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By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Israel will continue to offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine shot despite preliminary findings that it is not enough to prevent Omicron infections, a senior health official said on Tuesday, predicting contagions stoked by the variant will wane in a week.
The fastest country to roll out vaccinations a year ago, Israel last month started offering a fourth shot - also known as a second booster - to its most vulnerable and high-risk groups. It has held off on expanding the offer to the wider population.
A preliminary study published by Israel's Sheba Medical Center on Monday found that the fourth shot increases antibodies to even higher levels than the third but "probably" not enough to fend off the highly transmissible Omicron.
Health Ministry director-general Nachman Ash described those findings as "unsurprising, to a degree" as Omicron infections had been logged in some people after they received fourth doses.
But "protection from serious morbidity, especially for the elderly population and at-risk population, is still afforded by this vaccine (dose), and therefore I call on people to keep coming to get vaccinated," he told Army Radio.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sheba Medical Center said that even though the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in use today did not provide optimal infection protection against Omicron, "it is important to continue vaccinating the at-risk population."
As elsewhere, Israel has seen COVID-19 cases spiral due to Omicron. But it has logged no deaths from the variant, and Ash said there had been no increase in the number of COVID-19 patients on ECMO machines - a gauge of the most critical cases.
"In another week we will begin seeing a drop in the numbers, but we still have two or three difficult weeks ahead," he said, adding that some Health Ministry computers had been overloaded by the volume of testing data since Sunday, disrupting COVID-19 updates.
Hoping to reduce strain on the economy, Israel on Monday cut the mandatory quarantine period for COVID-19 carriers to five days. To conserve PCRs and reduce queuing at public testing sites, it has encouraged more use of home antigen kits. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Frank Jack Daniel)
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