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Israeli Arabs wonder how COVID-19 will shape Ramadan 2021

With vaccination rates still relatively low in Israeli-Arab towns and villages, residents there wonder how the upcoming month of Ramadan will look like.
Palestinian women worshippers gather to attend the prayers of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday which starts at the conclusion of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, outside the closed Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem's old city early on May 24, 2020. - Muslims around the world began marking a sombre Eid al-Fitr, many under coronavirus lockdown, but lax restrictions offer respite to worshippers in some countries despite fears of skyrocketing infections. Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, w

“We bet on Israel, and we’re glad we did, because what you’ve done here exceeds anything we could have imagined,” said CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla in a March 11 interview with Israel’s N12 news agency. He was explaining why Pfizer chose Israel to serve as the pilot for his company’s international vaccine distribution project. It has a relatively small population and a health-care system that collects data efficiently. In fact, the successful nationwide campaign turned a small country in the Middle East into a global leader, when it comes to the percentage of the population that has already been vaccinated against the coronavirus.

But there is a problem. At the start of the month, the nationwide infection rate was 1, while the infection rate in the Arab public reached 1.17. Thus, most of the towns still marked “red” by the traffic light model now being used come from the Arab sector.

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