# Can Massive Religious Festival Celebrations Encourage a Faster Spread of a Pandemic? The Case of COVID-19 in Israel

## TL;DR

This paper examines how religious festivals in Israel may have accelerated the spread of COVID-19 and proposes a new index to monitor such events during pandemics.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel index, National-SLIDRMRF-Index, to evaluate the impact of religious festivals on pandemic spread.

## Key findings

- Massive religious events can lead to an exponential increase in COVID-19 cases.
- A standardized index is needed to monitor and control pandemic spread during religious festivals.
- Policy recommendations are proposed for managing religious events in Jerusalem to curb infections.

## Abstract

This paper attempts to evaluate how massive religious festival celebrations can encourage the faster spread of any pandemic according to our problem statement, such as the case of COVID-19. For example, we evaluate Israel’s three major religions, namely  Judaism, Christianity, and the Islamic festival  celebrations, respectively. Firstly, we have the traditional Jewish festivities such as Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Rosh Hashanah. In the Christian’s traditional festivities celebrations, we identified Christmas, Easter Day, and All Saints Day. Finally, the Muslim festivities of Muharram and the Birthday of the Holy Prophet Mohamad. The purpose of  this study was to evaluate if these nine massive religious festival  celebrations are the main reasons for the large spread of COVID-19 in Israel directly or indirectly. In fact, we propose a new methodology to evaluate the impact of any massive religious festival celebration and the fast spread of any pandemic everywhere and anytime. The new indicator is entitled “The National Spread Levels of Infectious Diseases Risk from Massive Religious Festivities Index” (National-SLIDRMRF-Index). Finally, the major finding in this research is that any massive religious events can generate an exponential number of COVID-19 cases constantly. Therefore, this research concluded that we urgently need a standardized index to monitor  and control the expansion of any pandemic such as COVID-19 among different religious groups in the same country. At the same time, we give different policy recommendations to the Israeli government to constantly keep major controls and measures of different religious events in Jerusalem.