Herd immunity impossible. So why the obligations?

With the rise of COVID-19 last year, governments around the world touted the hope of so-called "herd immunity," a promised land where the virus stops spreading exponentially because enough people were protected against it. Too bad it's a fantasy.

The thought was that the pandemic would lessen and then mostly disappear once a slice of the population, perhaps 60% to 70%, was vaccinated or resisted due to a previous infection. But new variants like the delta, which are more transmissible and have been shown to evade these protections in some cases, are moving the bar of herd immunity near incredibly high levels.

Delta is spurring expanding outbreaks in countries like the US and the UK that have already been affected by the virus and presumably have some measure of natural immunity with vaccination rates above 50%. It also affects nations that have so far managed to keep the virus almost entirely out, such as Australia and China.

This month, the Infectious Diseases Society of America estimated that the delta variant pushed the threshold for herd immunity well beyond 80% and possibly close to 90% . Percentages of this kind are impossible to reach both for doubts related to vaccines and for general logistical problems.

“ Will we be able to get herd immunity? No, very unlikely, by definition, ”said Greg Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Even a 95 percent vaccination rate won't help, he said. " It is a race between the development of increasingly highly transmissible variants that develop the ability to evade immunity and immunization rates."

Nature will not solve the problem either. It is unclear how long the natural immunity gained by surviving COVID-19 will last and whether it will be effective in fighting the new strains. Future variants, including some that could evade immunity even more efficiently than the delta, raise questions about how and when this will all end.

" If it were as simple as getting infected once means being immune for life, that would be great, but I don't think that's the case, " said SV Mahadevan, director of South Asia Outreach at the Center for Asian Health Research and Education. at Stanford University Medical Center.

But at this point we have to ask ourselves a question: if it is not possible to achieve herd immunity, what is the point of having the vaccination obligation. Wouldn't it be more obvious to focus on healing rather than spending 90% of your energy reaching a goal that is not achievable?

---

---

The article Herd immunity impossible. So why the obligations? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

---

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/immunita-di-gregge-impossibile-allora-perche-gli-obblighi/ on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:06:36 +0000.