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i24NEWS DESK | Beersheba professor Mark Last is a proponent of the idea of the so-called ‘herd immunity’
Expect the curve of the coronavirus pandemic in Israel to steadily go down starting next month, an Israeli data scientist told the Jerusalem Post, warning, however, that in the meanwhile the death toll will climb further.
According to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Professor Mark Last, the number of Israelis infected with the virus who never showed any symptoms and thus didn’t get tested vastly outweighs the number of diagnosed patients.
Thus, once a high enough proportion of Israelis develop immunity to the virus, while the majority of the rest of the population adhere to social distancing and other health directives, the rate of the virus’s spread would drop down quickly.
“According to my calculations, we need 1.16 million people with antibodies in order to achieve herd immunity and we are very close to that number,” he said at the recent AIME 2020: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.
“If there is no unusual outbreak because of the return to school or trips to Uman in the Ukraine or mass weddings, then the infection rate will start dropping.”
No further lockdowns are necessary, the academic told the Jerusalem Post.
As of Sunday, the number of active cases in the country was at 20,151, including 892 patients at hospitals. Among those, 441 people are said to be in serious condition, and 121 are in need of artificial lung ventilation. The death toll hit 909.
According to Last, the death toll could climb by some 500 until the end of September.
