Biosecurity

Bleak and worried, Netanyahu implies virus could kill tens of millions worldwide

Announcing nationwide school closures and urging an emergency unity government to “save the lives of generations” of Israelis from the coronavirus, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday night presented a profoundly stark assessment of the pandemic’s potential global consequences, indicating that it could cause tens of millions of deaths if it cannot be stopped.

Netanyahu, who has instituted some of the world’s most stringent measures to try to thwart the spread of the virus in Israel in recent days and weeks, described the pandemic as “a global and national incident the likes of which Israel has never known.”

The last threat to which the coronavirus could be likened, he said, was the Spanish flu, one of the deadliest epidemics in human history, “which raged worldwide” in 1918. “Tens of millions of people died from it,” he noted, “at a time when the world population was a quarter of today’s.”