What We Did Right: Israeli Doctors Explain How They Beat the Coronavirus

It has been two and a half months since the discovery of the first coronavirus patient in Israel on February 27. During this period the focus has been on counting the sick, the tests and the ventilators, along with the mathematical models, the scenarios and the directives.

Meanwhile, the medical teams have faced the sharp edge: patients afflicted by a pneumonia that sometimes leads to multiple organ failure – and in about half the worst cases to death. These teams had to learn on the job. They scanned scientific studies and drew insights from the medical community both at home and abroad.

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Still, the gaps in the information about COVID-19 left a lot of room for interpretation and each hospital became a research and experimentation center in treating patients. At least 15 different treatment protocols, coming from various places around the world, were adopted and replaced at the hospitals.

Dr. Khetam Hussein, head of the Infection Control Service at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, May 2020.Rami Shllush

The crisis is still far from the summation stage, even as the number of new cases per day in Israel has fallen into the low double-digits. However, in the lull following the first infection wave, the doctors have time to look back.

Time

Above all, every pandemic is a race against time, whether in stopping the spread of the disease or treating individual patients. Many doctors admit that COVID-19 surprised them and that it doesn’t resemble anything they ever encountered.

“At first we thought it was a kind of flu because you see that as with the flu, most people infected get well and recover without complications,” says Dr. Khetam Hussein, head of the Infection Control Service and the coronavirus unit at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.