PM Pledges No More Lockdowns…Unless

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday promised that there will not be another lockdown to curb the coronavirus after the elections on March 23.

“There will unequivocally not be another lockdown,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Ynet.

But then, equivocating, he acknowledged that new mutated strains of the virus could require another lockdown.

He stressed, however, that it’s not on the drawing board. “If people think at the moment we are planning another lockdown after Pesach and the elections, I want Israeli citizens to know that when we say ‘getting back to life,’ this is what is happening,” Netanyahu said.

When the interviewer suggested that the national Covid death toll, which passed 6,000 on Sunday, represented a failure of the Netanyahu government, he replied:

“Six thousand dead is a difficult number for all of us, but it is much less than other countries our size,” he asserted.

The Times of Israel pointed out that Israel’s death rate of nearly 695 per 1 million people, is higher than the global average of 340 per 1 million, according to the Oxford-based Our World in Data.