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Originally Posted by Citroënbender

I felt the article was not evenly represented; it focused on cases, not deaths.

They are averaging (on a seven day basis), something like 23 Covid mortalities per day. That would be ~70 deaths per day for our population.

That's true. And a fair observation.

However, for me, the take away points were:

"They completely dropped their guard," said Kim Mulholland, a paediatrician at the University of Melbourne and member of the WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.

"There were lots of big gatherings, religious meetings, and all sorts of events that happened in June, in the middle of summer."

Leading infectious diseases expert Sharon Lewin said without any measures to control the Delta variant, it was difficult to stop chains of transmission, even with reasonably high rates of vaccination.

"What we've learned from [Israel], and what's consistent with the modelling … is that even at 80 per cent, you need to have some public health measures in place to contain transmission," said Professor Lewin, director of The Doherty Institute.

My bold there, just to highlight that the comment was made by the Director of the organisation that is leading the Federal Government's direction wrt Covid.

Making things more challenging is the fact that 25 per cent of Israel's population is younger than 12, meaning only 68 per cent of its whole population is fully vaccinated — a threshold too low to achieve herd immunity.

To try and tackle the surge of new COVID-19 cases, Israel has reintroduced some restrictions, including caps on public gatherings and masks in certain settings.

Health authorities have also begun to administer booster doses.

So even though the hospitalisation rate, as you've pointed out, is low, Israel are still re-introducing measures to minimise infection rates.

That being said, Israeli authorities are concerned about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines waning over time.

The majority of people suffering severe illness are over the age of 60 and received the COVID-19 vaccine at least five months ago.

"Most of the elderly in Israel were vaccinated with Pfizer, three weeks apart, back in January and February," Professor Lewin said.

"That's the other factor that's at play here. It's not just whether or not you were vaccinated; the time from vaccination seems to be important too."

But there is some good news for those Aussies who are vaccinated in the article, too:

"In Israel, when you look at the age-adjusted numbers for vaccination, the chance of you being hospitalised if you're over 60 is reduced 40-fold if you're vaccinated compared to if you're unvaccinated."

She said the fact fully vaccinated people were still being hospitalised was a reflection of very high vaccination rates, and the fact that no vaccine is perfect.

"The benefit of vaccination is that it reduces your chance of hospitalisation and death by about 90 per cent, but it's not 100 per cent," Professor Lewin said.

"So there will still be people that get hospitalised and die, even if they're vaccinated."

Fortunately, the relative number of deaths from COVID-19 in Israel is much lower than it was during the country's second wave.