re: #37 Hecuba’s daughter

OT — Bibi is belatedly shutting Israel down again. Is Israel’s now burgeoning coronavirus caseload due to the superspreading religious services?

It’s only a part of it i’m afraid, although a substantial number of cases this week were in the ultra-orthodox areas of Jerusalem.
Unfortunately it’s a much wider problem - Israel was doing really well at first on the COVID-19 front, going to great lengths to avoid folks from getting infected. This included city-by-city lockdowns during the Passover and other holidays in the country with roadblocks and everything.
And it worked; patient numbers reached a high of just over 10,000 before dropping steadily all the way to ~1700.

So what happened, you might ask?
They opened the country too damn early, that’s what. After weeks and weeks of lock-downs and growing skepticism that there were political motivations behind the restrictions and that the virus was “just another flu”***, restrictions were lifted despite medical recommendations that they be in place for another couple of week.
The first weekend after it was ok to resume ordinary life? Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of the excellent weather to crowd the national parks and restaurants, and resume large-scale religious groupings. All of it with no regard to social-distancing and without heeding the mandatory mask law (500NIS fine if cought without one - passed by the state but barely enforced)
The result was basically what we’re seeing now: steady rise of hundreds of new cases per day to over the all-time record number of cases today, effectively wiping away the efforts of the previous months.