News
Newsfeed
News
Friday
March 29
Show news feed

With new coronavirus cases dropping to below 20 a day, Israel on Tuesday retired its Green Pass system and will now allow equal access to restaurants, sports events, cultural activities and the like to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens, The New York Times reported.

Restrictions on the sizes of gatherings have also been lifted.

The decision came less than three months after Israel, a real-world laboratory for the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, pioneered its digitized Green Pass system and became a test case for an inoculated society.

For now, the only remaining pandemic restriction inside the country is a requirement to wear masks in closed public spaces, although that, too, is under discussion by health officials. The main efforts to control the coronavirus are now centered on restrictions for travel in and out of Israel, based on testing and quarantine. Strict limitations remain on the entry of people who are not Israeli citizens.

About 81 percent of Israel’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, but about 2.6 million children under 16 are still not eligible, out of a total population of just over nine million. Up to a million people have chosen not to be inoculated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.

“The Green Pass project was very successful,” said Tomer Lotan, the policy chief of Israel’s national coronavirus response center, summing up the experiment of the past few months. It was particularly effective, he said, as an incentive to encourage the 16-to-40 age group to get vaccinated and to allow Israel to reopen its economy.

!
This text available in   Հայերեն and Русский
Print
Read more:
All
Photos