THE NIGHT sky above Israel’s Mediterranean coast on May 11th was like a cosmic football match, as fiery shooting stars tried to outrun and catch each other; fireballs marked successful shots. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant Palestinian groups, have fired more than 1,000 rockets from Gaza, at targets including the greater Tel Aviv area, Israel’s main metropolis and home to 4m people. Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defence system has been trying to shoot them down with considerable success. Only a handful of rockets have got through to hit built-up areas. Despite the barrage, Israeli deaths remain in single digits.
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What you re seeing in the sky is the algorithm, an unnamed engineer who worked on developing the system, told The Economist. We ve been constantly improving the algorithm so it can face a barrage like this.
The Iron Dome algorithm has adapted to counter Hamas attempts to overwhelm the system with huge numbers of rockets, experts told The Economist.
But it doesn t come cheap: Every interceptor costs around $40,000, per The Economist, which is many times the cost of the basic Hamas munitions they intercept. When they re firing at a big city like Tel Aviv, there s no question: You intercept every incoming rocket, Isaac Ben-Israel, a former major-general and weapons specialist, told the outlet.
It should be safe to say that the United States is finally starting to move past Covid-19 as herd immunity nears closer and closer. The debate over whether lockdowns were a good pandemic response has been raging since day one with each side attempting to grasp at whatever immediate evidence is available.
The overwhelming evidence at this point seems to suggest that after controlling for various outliers, most sweeping policy responses like stay-at-home orders and business closures have very little correlation with stopping Covid-19. After factoring in the economic and social damage of lockdown policies, the case for their long-term use becomes untenable. This fact has been hinted at almost since the beginning of the pandemic and increasingly confirmed by the latest data.