The statement: “Defeating the pandemic AND restoring our economy is the safest and most effective way to immunize the population. The way to achieve ‘herd immunity’ is for> 70% of the population to be vaccinated. ”- State Representative Jon Rosenthal, D-Cypress.
Rosenthal, who lost a family member and friend to COVID-19, said he went to Twitter to dispel “unbridled misinformation” about the virus and its vaccine.
Fact assessment: mostly true. The herd immunity threshold is calculated using the transmission rate of a disease. Although scientists have not agreed on a definite rate, and although these rates are highly theoretical, estimates show that the threshold for COVID-19 is between 60 and 83 percent.
Discussion
The strategy to bring about herd immunity within a population to stop the spread of COVID-19 has been a matter of intense debate in the course of the pandemic.
One part of this debate involves the herd immunity threshold, or the percentage of a population that needs to be vaccinated against a disease, whether through infections or vaccinations, to reduce the spread. The more contagious an infection is, the higher the threshold.
Measles, a highly contagious disease that is at least three times as contagious as COVID-19, requires a herd threshold of about 94 percent immunity, meaning that 94 percent of the population must be immune to measles before it can be transmitted. . price declines.
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But to establish a concrete herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 has so far been theoretical guesswork.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say that the herd immunity threshold for any virus is between 50 and 90 percent.
Immunity can be achieved in two ways: through natural infections, which create antibodies in people who have recovered from a disease that could potentially ward off future infection (an estimated 20 percent of the world’s population is infected); or by vaccination, a safer way to immunity because it does not cause disease.
The herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 has been a moving target throughout the pandemic, as researchers struggle with understanding the virus.
“It’s kind of this changing conversation about what the actual basic reproduction number of the virus is,” said Spencer Fox, co-director of the COVID-19 modeling consortium at the University of Texas. “We try to extrapolate from other populations, but each population will have a slightly different number.”
The result is a herd immunity threshold of 60 to 83 percent for the new coronavirus.
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Dr. David Dowdy, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, stressed that these numbers are highly theoretical.
The herd immunity threshold is “something that the public can easily understand, but that does not really reflect reality,” Dowdy said. “The reality is that it’s a spectrum, but people like to see things in black and white and like to have specific numbers.”
“At some point, we will build up enough immunity. “Whether it is through people who contract the disease or through people who get the vaccine, the transmission (rate) will start to decrease,” he said. ‘It’s not like we have a magic number to hit, and if we do not hit it, we will have this pandemic forever. The more people we can vaccinate, the fewer people get sick and die. ‘
Nevertheless, Fox said that announcing a threshold level for herd immunity is useful for public health efforts.
“Right now, the most important thing is to provide a high number, to motivate people to get the vaccine, because I think we should try to vaccinate as many people as possible,” Fox said.
The 70 percent threshold quoted by Rosenthal and others is, according to Fox, ‘in the ballpark’.
‘It could possibly be as low as 50 percent and as high as 80 percent, so 70 percent is in the middle. I will shoot higher. “I would not expect the disease to disappear at this stage,” he said.