Photo Credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives via Flickr

Starting in 1904, Mary Mallon, a.k.a. Typhoid Mary, an Irish cook who immigrated to NY City, is believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever—three of them died—and was the first asymptomatic carrier of the disease in the United States. She persisted in working as a cook, infecting her affluent employers, until she was twice forcibly quarantined by the authorities and died after a almost three decades in isolation.

Turns out Typhoid Mary has nothing on this one Israeli man who, according to the head of Public Health Services Dr. Sharon Elrai-Price returned from the UK carrying the infamous UK mutation of the coronavirus, and infected an estimated 30 people who in turn infected a chain of 700 individuals.

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“The situation is not simple, we are at a peak since the beginning of the pandemic,” Elrai-Price told Reshet Bet radio on Tuesday, but noted that “the effect of the vaccinations is beginning to show.”

According to the head of Public Health Services, the Health Ministry will recommend extending the lockdown by two weeks, partly due to the spread of the British mutation. She called on law enforcement to “do everything, we’re in a maddening morbidity that takes up human lives, more than 50 deaths a day of people who could have been saved, it is a preventable disease.”

Regarding the failure to prevent virus carriers from walking out of Ben Gurion Airport unchecked, Elrai-Price said, “We’ve been warning for weeks if not months that letting patients enter via Ben Gurion Airport is needless. The most basic and most important thing is maintaining isolation. It’s time to reduce air traffic, reduce departures and landings. And everyone must be tested before boarding the plane.”

Regarding the “green passport,” she said: “We will never create an outline whereby only vaccinated people would be permitted enter, it’s not ethical. We can’t produce outlines denying entry for people who could not be vaccinated. When we create the [green passport] outline, we will also create the option for testing. I estimate that within a month and a half we could start running it.”

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David writes news at JewishPress.com.