Israel will go into full lockdown this week starting Sept. 18, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Once that happens, Israel will be the first country in the developed world to impose a second lockdown.
How did Israel go from being the country that “world leaders wanted to study because of its successful approach to dealing with the coronavirus,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted, to a “red-zone” state with significantly higher infection rates than the rest of the world? In a report by Johns Hopkins University, Israel ranked first in the world in per capita infection for the week ending on Sept. 2, with an average of 199.3 infections per million inhabitants every day of that week.