The Coronavirus Passover Miracle
How 99.99% of an ultra-orthodox Jewish city survived despite being the epicenter of Israel’s coronavirus outbreak
Bnai Barak is a city in Israel of roughly 200,000, of which 95% are ultra-orthodox Jews. It is the 10th most densely populated city in the world with roughly the same density as Manhattan. Its ultra-orthodox Jewish residents enjoy an insulated and tight knit community with a great deal of emphasis on their Jewish faith.
Coronavirus scares lead to a crisis in Bnai Barak
Ultra-orthodox Jews are not typically on the same page as secular Jews and most did not follow social distancing guidelines throughout March. This created what was described as a crisis and Israel deployed some of its most elite military forces across the city to enforce a strict and controversial lock down.
Here is what the media was reporting just two weeks ago…
March 30th (emphasis added)
Ultra-Orthodox Jews failing to comply with government instructions to contain the coronavirus… The virus is mushrooming in ultra-Orthodox communities as much as four to eight times faster than elsewhere in Israel. — New York Times
The wildfire pace of infection has inflamed tensions between the ultra-Orthodox… and other Israelis. — New York Times
In the predominantly secular city of Ramat Gan, which adjoins Bnei Brak, the mayor on Monday demanded a curfew on Bnei Brak, saying the hot spot there “isn’t any longer a ticking bomb, it’s a powerful bomb that blew up in our faces.” — New York Times
April 3rd (emphasis added)
By Friday, Bnei Brak had become the country’s worst hot spot and now resembles a ghost town. The military will soon be sending troops in to assist local authorities. One expert estimated that nearly 40% of the city’s population might already have been infected. — Time
All looked for grim for the city and religious leaders agreed to comply with the lock down
With concern that their entire population was already at risk, senior religious leaders relented and urged residents to follow the government’s stay-at-home orders. This seems like a reasonable response when told that so many people are going to die.
Densely populated areas are at risk for high infection rates due to close proximity. For example, a recent Boston homeless shelter tested 36% positive for coronavirus, showing how far it can penetrate a small community.
Bnai Barak was blockaded and residents were restricted to their homes, with the military providing over a 1,000 tons of food and necessities. The streets remained peaceful and the government cited positive mutual respect between the residents and the military imposing the restrictions.
Like the 10th plague of Egypt, Jewish residents sheltered in place hoping the deadly threat would pass their home.
Two weeks later… a Passover miracle occurs. 99.99% survive!
Passover is one of the more celebrated of Jewish holidays, although this year most of Israel was under a strict curfew dampening some of the holiday spirit.
Passover came and went from April 8th to the 16th, and within just after two weeks of saying that the city had turned into the Israeli coronavirus epicenter, the city is now… getting ready to partially re-open?
Only 2,109 residents have tested positive, and while this New York Times update highlights the dangers of the virus, it fails to report a single death from the last two weeks. This seemed very strange, so I tried to dig deeper into it.
Unlike other cities which locked down before things got bad, this city was already being called the “epicenter”
When the city lock down really started in earnest, the virus was already spreading “like wildfire” — and it wasn’t “any longer a ticking bomb, it’s a powerful bomb that blew up in our faces.”
So even a full lock down would not be able to undo the untold damage that the community already caused before obeying, right?
So where are all the deaths that you would expect to be reported? Where are the bodies littering the streets of this calamity?
New York Times fails to report deaths in its post-disaster story
The New York Times didn’t report how many died, so I got this report from April 12th that breaks down coronavirus deaths in Israel. At the time, 96 people died in Israel with Bnai Barak representing 7% of the deaths, so I assume that is 7 people.
But that report was 4 days ago. As of today, April 16th, there are 142 total deaths in Israel. Given that Bnai Barak was following social distancing after the shutdown, I’ll assume the last 4 days were not that different from the previous 4 weeks. So applying 7% to the 142 deaths, that means ~10 people in Bnai Barak have died of coronvirus in total.
These 10 deaths represent the cases of the rampant socially non-distant disaster wildfire of a city before the shutdown.
Another way of putting it is that ~199,990 out of ~200,000 people survived.
99.99% survived after being trapped in the national epicenter of coronavirus. Trapped in a viral wildfire. In a bomb that blew up in our face.
Again, we have the great miracle of Passover 2020!
So what actually happened?
It’s possible this was a true Passover miracle, but more likely it was not the work of a divine being but rather a reflection of mortal humans who are stuck in a coronavirus group think.
Unlike other cities, people can’t claim the “so many would have died” argument as a counter-factual to the shutdown, because at the start of the shutdown the city was supposed to be rampant already with coronavirus (which it probably was).
This wasn’t about stopping runway deaths, it was about limiting the damage expected in the national epicenter. Yet, 99.99% survived. Why?
Oh, the median age in Bnai Barak is under 18?
Israel is in general a relatively young country by western standards, with a median age of 29.9. This compared to the US with a median age of 38.1, and to Italy where the median age is one of the highest in the world at 45.5.
Ultra-orthodox Jews in particular tend to have lots of kids, and they tend to also have them at a young age. The median age at Bnai Barak is somewhere around 17–18, with 47.4% of residents age 17 or younger. This is probably because each household has so many children.
Is it possible that the Passover coronavirus miracle was actually just the virus taking its course through a young community after the initial outbreak?
Surely one of the world’s densest cities, full of non-socially distancing residents at a covid viral epicenter, would have seen some significant spread of the virus. Even if only 5% were infected, which seems quite low, that would still be a 99.9% survival rate of those infected.
So did experts screw up by estimating that this was a wildfire exploding bomb two weeks ago? Or did they screw up by grossly overestimating the risk?
It really is one or the other, or maybe both. Experts can’t hide behind the “it would have been worse” argument because they were screaming that it was already a disaster just two weeks ago.
So-called experts should have understood that the city’s extremely young demographic put them in a completely different risk group. Meanwhile the media continues to fear monger and ignore stories like this, and the world continues to listen to the same experts who have been wrong over and over.
The strict shutdown response, which prevented normal worshiping on passover as has been done for over a hundred generations, highlights the problems with world’s binary sledgehammer approach.
For the record, I am not denying that COVID-19 is a dangerous and very deadly virus. Nor am I necessarily against shutdowns in all situations, but it needs to be warranted on a risk-adjusted basis. Social distancing clearly slows down the spread of a human-to-human transmittable virus, but it doesn’t have to be total shutdown or nothing. Most governments are yet to pick up on this nuance and they enforce the most extreme of measures despite data to the contrary.
We have implicitly ceded powers to our governments to curtail freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of travel.
While we have given up those rights with the best of intention, most students of history will understand that it is only a matter of when, and not if, short term emergency acts of power become abused in the long term.
Actions taken by fear for short term safety have a bad track record of long term risks to human rights.
Or maybe the experts really were right, and the Jews of Bnai Barak miraculously survived over Passover as the plague passed over 99.99% of their houses. Chag Sameach.
