Despite an initial success, Israel’s quarantine-isolation COVID-19 policy has abruptly collapsed. This study’s aim is to identify the causes that led to this exponential rise in the accumulation of confirmed cases. Epidemiological investigation reports were used to reconstruct chains of transmission as well as assess the net contribution of local infections relative to imported cases, infected travelers arriving from abroad. A mathematical model was implemented in order to describe the efficiency of the quarantine-isolation policy and the inflow of imported cases. The model’s simulations included two scenarios for the actual time series of the symptomatic cases, providing insights into the conditions that lead to the abrupt change. The abrupt change followed a Jewish holiday, Purim, in which many public gatherings were held. According to the first scenario, the accumulation of confirmed cases before Purim was driven by imported cases resulting in a controlled regime, with an effective reproduction number, Re, of 0.69. In the second scenario, which followed Purim, a continuous rise of the local to imported cases ratio began, which led to an exponential growth regime characterized by an Re of 4.34. It was found that the change of regime cannot be attributed to super-spreader events, as these consisted of approximately 5% of the primary cases, which resulted in 17% of the secondary cases. A general lesson for health policymakers should be that even a short lapse in public responsiveness can lead to dire consequences.

A reliable forecast of the wind vector at a given site is an important problem with a broad scope of application. Many uses are in the field of wind power in which prediction of strong winds is important; other uses are in the field of civil engineering, where wind gusts are important to structural integrity. For predicting air pollution events or the hazard zone in case of toxic gas accidents the low wind scenarios are of the highest importance, especially under stable conditions. These low wind scenarios are the situations which meso‐scale numerical models encounter difficulties or are often neglected when dealing with wind power tasks. Additional drawbacks of meso‐scale numerical models in this context are their lack of site‐specific detail and the fact that they are very demanding numerically.The ‘similar days’ method presented here is a method for the prediction of winds at a given location which works well also for low and variable wind conditions. The method is very efficient numerically: typically, runtime is less than a minute on a single PC. This method is based on using the last few hours' measurements at the given site and comparing it to an historical database. A set of criteria is defined to determine the time series similarity. Those similar days are used to construct the forecast.The similar days method was applied to a total of 5 years of measurements collected in two different locations. Very good agreement was achieved between prediction and measurements. Copyright © 2009 Royal Meteorological Society

Both monogenic diseases and viral infections can manifest in a broad spectrum of clinical phenotypes that range from asymptomatic to lethal, suggesting that other factors modulate disease severity. Here, we examine the interplay between the genetic neuronopathic Gaucher’s disease (nGD), and neuroinvasive Sindbis virus (SVNI) infection. Infection of nGD mice with SVNI had no influence on nGD severity. However, nGD mice were more resistant to SVNI infection. Significantly different inflammatory responses were seen in nGD brains when compared with SVNI brains: the inflammatory response in the nGD brains consisted of reactive astrocytes and microglia with no infiltrating macrophages, but the inflammatory response in the brains of SVNI-infected mice was characterized by infiltration of macrophages and altered activation of microglia and astrocytes. We suggest that the innate immune response activated in nGD confers resistance against viral infection of the CNS.