JERUSALEM, Feb 1 (Reuters) – A global leader in vaccine rollout during early waves of the coronavirus, Israel’s government has adopted “Living with COVID” as its mantra since a few months before Omicron arrived. “The staff are exhausted,” said Yoram Weiss, acting director general of Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. The sheer magnitude of the surge has meant that coronavirus wards have been filling up fast while numbers of staff, many kept at home by Omicron infection, have fallen, also impacting quality of care. “We have on average 10-15% less doctors and nurses, whereas we need 20-30% more because of the flood of patients,” Dror Mevorach, who heads Hadassah’s coronavirus ward, told Reuters. The shortage has also forced hospitals to divert resources to COVID wards, cutting back on other procedures, and in mid-January several scientists urged the government to intervene to reduce infection rates.
