Israel as a case study 

In September 2020, the Israeli government was considering (and later implemented) a second “full” lockdown over the upcoming holiday season. (The first such lockdown was arranged six months earlier over the Passover holiday.) A key factor in the decision to re-lockdown the country was the governmental claim that Israeli hospitals were totally overwhelmed and had well over 100% capacity for COVID patients.^[1][2] The situation was allegedly so bad that the Health Ministry ordered hospitals to stop all non-urgent treatments and surgeries.^[3] Shockingly, the hospitals themselves counter-claimed that they were far from being “at capacity”.^[4] This prompted an undercover investigative report by Israeli Channel 12, which proved that the COVID wards were actually well under capacity.^[5] In response, the Israeli government quickly expunged all COVID hospital data from their website^[6] and the second “full” lockdown in Israel proceeded. Weeks later it was revealed that about a third of hospitalized COVID “patients” in fact recovered from COVID and were in the hospital for unrelated issues.^[7]

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