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Collective immunity: why some believe it could end the coronavirus pandemic Collective immunity: why some believe it could end the coronavirus pandemic April 23, 2020 236 Share As the coronavirus pandemic spreads worldwide, doctors, scientists and heads of government have said that once collective immunity is achieved, the spread of the virus will be less threatening.
Collective immunity is reached when the majority of a given population – 70 to 90% – becomes immune to an infectious disease, either because they become infected and have recovered, or through vaccination.
When this happens, the disease is less likely to spread to people who are not immune, because there simply are not enough infectious carriers to reach them.
There are only two ways to get there: generalized vaccination, which for Covid-19 is still several months away, or generalized infections which lead to immunity.
Most doctors and experts agree that allowing Covid-19 to plow people could help achieve collective immunity faster, but it would also overwhelm hospitals.
“The advantage of expanding the number of cases is that we will not exceed the capacity of hospitals to care for particularly sick people,” Dr. H. Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts University Medical, told CNN.
Then there is the problem that we don’t really know how immunity works with this virus.
World Health Organization (WHO) infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said that it is unknown whether people who have been exposed to the virus are fully immune to it and, if so, , for how long.
The WHO has “seen preliminary results, preliminary studies, pre-published results, in which some people will develop an immune response,” said Van Kerkhove.
“We don’t know if that actually confers immunity, which means they are fully protected.
“ A vaccine is a better answer, she added.
” And while young people are much less likely to die from Covid-19, they can still fall ill enough to require hospitalization.
Although catching Covid-19 once makes people immune to future infection, the United States has not had enough cases to come close to generalized immunity.
“The level of people who have been infected, I don’t expect it to reach this level to give what we call immune protection for the herd,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute allergies and infectious diseases.
“What that would mean would protect those who were exposed, but at the community level, there would not have been enough infections to really have enough immune protection,” said Fauci.
As a vaccine has not yet been created for the new coronavirus, some have argued that nations should give up closures altogether and try to achieve collective immunity by keeping the vulnerable inside while allowing others to live their normal lives – and be infected.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to support a similar belief in March when he suspended the ban on large rallies and the closure of schools.
Restaurants, schools and playgrounds in the Scandinavian country are open.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has said that she does not follow the theory of collective immunity, but rather relies on its citizens to make them willingly responsible for preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
But Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said that collective immunity could be reached in the national capital, Stockholm, in a few weeks.
“In most parts of Sweden, around Stockholm, we have reached a plateau (in new cases) and we are already seeing the effects of collective immunity and in a few weeks we will see even more,” Tegnell said.
said in an interview with CNBC.
This is why so many people ask for antibody tests.
With the touch of a finger, tests to find out if you have contracted the coronavirus can help public health officials determine which part of the population has been infected and, in theory anyway, has least some immunity to the virus, said Caroline Buckee, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard TH’s Chan School of Public Health.
A city in California has already started testing antibodies to its residents.