israeli covid deaths data

asking the key question: where are we?

the israeli covid data has been a bit hard to read as reporting issues from the holidays (rosh hashana last week, yom kippur which is about to begin) but the data today dropped a worrying piece into the puzzle.

in this highly vaccinated nation leading the world on booster shots (roughly 34%).

deaths are breaking out to new highs for the surge.

we saw a similar pattern last year where deaths had a roughly 4 week plateau and then rose again sharply. this was not the holidays as both fell in late september last year during peak surge.

that plateau ended 70 days from the start of the seasonal surge. we are now 70 days from the start of this year’s surge. and deaths just broke out higher.

should we be worried?

it seems like perhaps we should.

caveat:

this could be a reporting artifact, a bolus built up from low reports last week or hurrying to beat sundown for yom kippur, and we cannot rule that out yet, so let’s keep that in mind. expect to see a sharp drop tomorrow (and probably the day after) because of the holiday curtailing reporting.

but if this is not a bolus and rather the end of the plateau, we’re looking at something quite worrying.

it would mean that we’re about to see a surge that looks worse that last year from a less deadly variant in a more immune society that has seen more covid before and recovered and in which highly vulnerable groups have already been lost.

and it looks to correlate with frightening tightness to administering the boosters.

which in turn, look like last time they pushed vaccines hard.

if this deaths count breaks out to levels above this season last year, it will pose some serious problems for those claiming vaccines have been having a positive society level effect. unfortunately, the next few days data is going to be unreliable, but it should be getting clean again by next week.

this is the canary we all ought to have our eyes on.