Israel will lift the requirement to wear masks outdoors starting from Sunday, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein announced Thursday, adding that he instructed the ministry’s Director-General Chezy Levy to sign a directive for this purpose. The requirement will remain for indoor spaces.
The move had been under discussion for several weeks, but authorities decided to wait until the end of the national holidays of Remembrance Day and Independence Day fearing that mask-less celebrations might lead to a spike in the cases.The vast majority of experts agree that the risk of contracting the coronavirus outdoors is very limited. “We know that wearing masks outdoors is not as effective as doing it indoors,” Dr. Eyal Leshem, the director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer told The Jerusalem Post last week. “Moreover, we see that many people don’t actually wear masks anymore anyway. Therefore, at this point, with a low number of cases and a majority of the population vaccinated or recovered, it would make sense from epidemiological and public health perspectives to lift the requirement.”Israel has currently only 3,000 active cases. At the peak of the pandemic, there were dozens of thousands.“The masks are intended to protect us from the coronavirus,” Edelstein said. “After our health professionals came to the conclusion that they are no longer needed outdoors, I decided to allow it according to their recommendation.”“The level of morbidity in Israel is very low thanks to our successful vaccination campaign, and thus we can ease up further restrictions for you, citizens of Israel,” he said. “I ask you to still carry a mask in order to enter closed buildings. Together we will keep the morbidity low.”
Also on Sunday, the education system will resume functioning in full after over a year. All children will go back studying in their classrooms with no more capsules.
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