Israel has expanded its travel ban to ten new countries, including Canada, the United States and Germany, as data reveals that around 20 percent of recent COVID cases came from abroad.
Also, Israel’s authorities expanded the list of “red countries” to other countries like Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey and Switzerland. The ban will come into effect soon.
Travel to and from these “red countries” is expressly prohibited, except permission is granted by a special committee. Those who travel back from the blacklisted countries must quarantine for seven days.
Out of 5,787 new coronavirus cases in the recent week, 877 came from abroad.
Recently, 10 percent of a flight from Miami tested positive for COVID, with most of 17 cases suspected of carrying the omicron variant.
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry announced that it detected 40 new omicron cases, bringing the total number of cases of the variant to 175.
Assessments submitted to Bennett recently forecasted that the number of omicron cases in Israel will get to 400 to 600 over the next week, due to the number of cases which cannot be traced back to people that travelled abroad.
