Israel bans travel to the US, Canada and 8 other countries due to the omicron variant of the coronavirus

Israel approved today the expansion of the red list of countries where Israelis are prohibited from traveling due to the expansion of the omicron variant, including the United States, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Morocco, Turkey, Hungary, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada.

“The Cabinet ministers approved the expansion of the list of Red States, according to the recommendation” yesterday from the Ministry of Health, reported the office of Prime Minister Naftali Benet.

As specified, the measure will take effect at midnight on Tuesday 21 and implies that Israeli citizens are prohibited from traveling to all these countries, except if a special and justified permission is obtained.

At the same time, they are obliged to quarantine themselves for between a week and 10 days if they return from these places, depending on whether they are vaccinated or not.

Faced with the worldwide spread of omicron, Israel It has been expanding in recent weeks the countries on its red list. Among these are already the majority of African States, the United Kingdom or European Union (EU) countries such as Spain, France, Ireland, Belgium or Sweden, which were included last week.

At the end of November, to protect itself against the new strain, Israel closed its borders to tourists, while internally it maintains a relatively normal daily life, without great restrictions.

“We have to maintain the economy and education” open “as much as we can,” Benet declared yesterday, at a press conference in which he warned that the fifth wave of infections in Israel is already evident.

The numbers of infections within the country “are not high yet, but we can say that the fifth wave has begun,” he said, and again urged parents to vaccinate their children between 5 and 11 years of age to obtain greater protection against the new variant.

The health authorities yesterday detected 40 infections of the new strain, which now amount to 175 cases; While the country registered in the last 24 hours more than 1,000 new infections of covid-19, figures that had not been reached for more than two months, with an infection rate of 1.09%.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Israel has been one of the countries that has taken the most rigid and forceful measures abroad to contain the spread of the virus.

All this despite the fact that currently the majority of people who arrive from abroad – only Israelis or foreigners with a residence permit – enter with vaccination certificates, several PCR tests and must isolate themselves for at least three days, while in the interior of the country the measures restrictive are rather lax.

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