The numbers are pretty startling: On Jan. 1, Israeli authorities logged only 6,000 new COVID infections. On Jan. 19, they tallied a record-high 243,000 cases in a single day. At the peak of the Omicron surge in mid-January, just 3,500 people were hospitalized with serious cases of COVID. To put that in perspective, cases on the worst day of the current surge were 10 times higher than on the worst day of all the previous surges. And on the worst day for Omicron deaths—Feb. 1—121 Israelis died. This in a country with just 9.2 million people.

“Omicron hits everyone, whether vaccinated or not,” Gili Regev-Yochay, a Harvard epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast. But hospitalizations and deaths haven’t risen nearly as much as cases. That disconnect—“decoupling,” epidemiologists call it—helps explain Israel’s seemingly counterintuitive response to the current COVID surge.

The country did… nothing. That response, or lack of one, could signal a new attitude toward COVID in Israel and similar countries.