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In late July, Israel began offering everyone over the age of 60 a third vaccine dose, a move that has been rapidly expanded. Throughout August, the booster program has gradually been rolled out to more of the population, and third shots have been available to everyone over the age of 30 since Tuesday.

Israelis receiving a booster shot are required to wait five months after their second dose before they become eligible for their third.

Professor Eyal Leshem, an infectious disease specialist at Sheba Medical Center who has been treating patients on Israel’s frontlines, told CNBC via telephone that while cases were rising, the rate of severe illness remained “substantially lower.”

“We attribute that to the fact that most of our adult population is vaccinated with two doses, and more than one million people have received the third booster dose,” he said.

“The severe disease rates in the vaccinated are about one-tenth of those seen in the unvaccinated, which means the vaccine is still over 90% effective in preventing severe disease,” Leshem added. “People who received the booster dose are also at much, much lower risk of becoming infected, our short-term data shows.”

Leshem said that in Israel, one million out of the country’s population of 9 million had already been confirmed to have been naturally infected.

“We assume that if we have 1 million that were confirmed, we probably have another hundreds of thousands, if not more, that were ‘silently infected,'” he said, noting that this could help to bolster the immunity given by the vaccine.

Ultimately, Leshem said, the goal was not to eliminate Covid-19, but to reach a state of “equilibrium.”

“Covid circulates globally, and it also circulates in wildlife, so it will be very challenging if ever to eradicate,” he said. “Therefore, most of the population will be infected at some point. Hopefully, this will be after they are protected with vaccines and therefore infection will be mild.”

“Many infectious diseases initially emerged in a pandemic form and then reached equilibrium. Of course, the most crucial question is how long is it going to take for us to live normally with Covid? Is this a matter of several years or longer? The vaccines accelerate this process because they allow more people to become naturally infected without developing severe disease,” Leshem said.

Gideon Schreiber, a professor at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, told CNBC in a call that while the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine appeared to become less effective at preventing Covid-19 transmission over time, Israel’s vaccination booster program seemed to be making “a huge difference.”

“I guess in a few weeks we will see a huge decline in the disease because of the third vaccination doses,” he said. “If you look at the over 60s, which made up most of the severely ill people, they were around four or five times less likely to get severe disease with the delta [after their second dose]. But now they’re more than tenfold less likely to get severe disease after the third shot.”

This, he added, was likely to be because of the fresh antibodies produced in people who received a third dose of the vaccine. It’s thought that a decline in antibodies over time may be behind the waning immunity seen in people who have been given two doses of a Covid-19 shot, but no vaccine is ever 100% effective at preventing a disease.

“We now have a very rapid pace of third vaccinations, so I would guess that the results will be seen very clearly, and in the near future we will see an overall decline of severe disease and of disease [in general],” Schreiber said.