Israel celebrates Easter and a newfound normality thanks to the anti-Covid vaccination campaign
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Alaina
- . March 29, 2021
- . Update: March 29, 2021 8:08 pm
Overpassed the political stalemate of the last elections, Israel celebrated the return to life after a year of COVID-19 pandemic this weekend.
The extended families were able to celebrate together the Pesach holiday, Easter, which began on Saturday evening. Jewish celebrate freedom from Egyptian and Zoom slavery. This year they did not have to give up the long tables of the Seder, the traditional dinner that opens the feast, in which the Jews read the texts that evoke the exodus from Egypt, and the images of the desolate ceremony spent a year ago in solitude they seem like the memory of another era.
In Jerusalem, the Catholic Church celebrated Palm Sunday with thousands of participants who were able to join the traditional procession from the Mount of Olives to the Old City, starting Holy Week. “We are still far from the numbers of the past, when tourists from all over the world arrived for the occasion, but it was an important moment “also to begin to show signs of normality and above all the confidence in a resumption of normal life,” the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Pierbattista Pizzaballa said.
Once the threshold of 50% of the population immunized with both doses of Pfizer serum has been exceeded, the country also celebrates the success of the vaccination campaign that demonstrates its effectiveness in breaking down the contagion curve. A little more than a month after the release of the last (third) lockdown and with a gradual relaxation of the restrictions that led to the opening today of all sectors according to the “green pass” rules, the contagion index is confirmed in constant decline and today stands at around 0.55. Mortality (-85%) and infections (-86%) drop drastically.
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Yesterday around 300 new daily infections were recorded, while only at the beginning of March the daily average was 2,500 new positives. If you think that January, with the arrival of the British variant, was the worst month since the beginning of the pandemic, with over 1,000 deaths (6,183 since the start of the crisis), even at the beginning of March the experts expressed themselves with caution regarding the resumption of routine. But the effect of the vaccination campaign, which began on December 20 and advanced at a brisk pace, has proved evident from week to week and now the government announces that next week – after evaluating the situation at the end of Easter week – the issue will be discussed. elimination of masks at least in the open air.
The feeling that Covid belongs to the past already seems very present among the people: almost 200,000 Israelis visited natural parks and archaeological sites over the weekend and masks were often optional. Clubs and discos have also resumed their activity and gathered thousands of people thanks to the green pass, which binds entry to immunized and cured people in certain sectors of the economy such as gyms, closed spaces in restaurants, hotels, stadiums, places of culture.
For a week now it has also been possible to access these exercises by presenting a quick swab, allowing entry to non-immunized and children under 16, who still do not have access to the vaccine.
