Without A Vaccine, Herd Immunity Won't Save Us

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Daniel Arlein has already had COVID-19. In March, the 36-year-old small business owner and DJ, who lives in Brooklyn, tested positive for the viral infection and suffered through two weeks of flu-like symptoms.

Arlein has since recovered, and while he’s still being careful — avoiding leaving the house, washing his hands more often and wearing a face mask — he can’t help feeling a bit relieved to have already had the infection.

“The only way it’s helping me is psychologically, to be able to go out in the world and still be careful but not be freaked out that I’m going to get sick,” he said. “I have no idea if I will get sick again. I feel like I won’t, but I have no idea if I can get it again.”

Most people understand immunity to mean that once a person has been exposed to a disease, they can’t get it again. It’s an easy concept to grasp, and some people have hoped that widespread immunity could be the way out of this pandemic: If enough of the population becomes immune to the disease, the spread would be stopped, since the virus would run out of new, susceptible targets. The “herd” of immune people would protect everyone.

But getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t as simple as the idea itself. A number of variables can affect when herd immunity is reached — and what it costs to get there — and they vary depending on the disease. How infectious is the disease? How deadly is it? And how long do people stay immune once they’ve gotten it? Adjusting any of these variables can drastically change the outcome of this equation. You can probably sense where this is heading …

-more-

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/without-a-vaccine-herd-immunity-wont-save-us/

[Wounded Bear]

1. People touting herd immunity are ignoring how many members of the herd must die...

for there there to be some equilibrium, not to mention having a rather cavalier attitude about who will die.

They always think that they will be one of the survivors. It's how politicians have been convincing young folks to march off to war for all of history. "Don't worry, it's the other guy who won't come back."

[Newest Reality]

2. I was surprised...

I was surprised when I found out that there has never been a corona virus vaccine.

[DrToast]

3. It's never been so important

There was one developed for SARS, but the spread was contained so there wasn’t a need to continue trials of it.

[Baclava]

9. There was never a vaccine for SARS, were working on one, but it failed to get through animal testing

[DrToast]

10. Per Fauci, there was one

?t=1622

[Baclava]

11. That's a 3 year old wishful thinking report! A vaccine was never developed for and tested in humans

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Apparently, because this is a novel virus,

meaning brand new and so no of us have immunity to begin with, the number needed to achieve herd immunity is something like 90%. And even if nothing is done to flatten the curve, even if hospitals and cemeteries can handle the influx of new clients, even if immunity, once you've had it, is permanent, the question then becomes: How long will it take to achieve genuine herd immunity?

Something else to think about. Our planet has about 6 billion more people than it can support. We should really have only about 1 billion people here. I wonder how that might come about.

[Initech]

5. I've been reading a lot about the parallels betwen 1918 and today.

It really is almost exactly like history is repeating itself. We had the initial wave now which seems to be dying down. Then we will have a much larger wave in the fall. Then we will have another, smaller wave in the spring. And that will be it.

But doing some reading about what happened between 1918 and today it's almost like we really didn't learn anything from history. There were people hawking fake cures. The religious right was insisting that lockdowns were hampering on their freedom to worship in large numbers. The economy took a massive shit. It was an election year.

They even had the same ideas about herd immunity that are being floated about now. It's like history is repeating itself.

[Mariana]

6. I wonder what the mortality rate of the 1918 flu would have been

even in the absence of a vaccine, if they'd had access to all of our modern medical knowledge, practices, devices and drugs. It probably would have been much lower - especially since so many of those who died from it were young and healthy to begin with. I suppose there's no way even to guess what the difference would have been.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. Here are a couple of interesting factoids about the 1918 flu epidemic.

First is, that it had zero effect on population growth. One hundred million dead of a world population of about 1.6 or 1.8 billion isn't all that much in terms of percentage. About one half of one percent.

Where that flu REALLY impacted things was in life expectancy, and that was only for about two years. Here's a fascinating chart: https://ourworldindata.org/spanish-flu-largest-influenza-pandemic-in-history

The impact of WWI is somewhat confabulated here. But if you look at the United States, which didn't get into WWI until 1917, the impact of the 1918 flu epidemic is somewhat clearer.

You can look up individual countries or groups of countries as you wish. But the most important thing to me is that life expectancy bounced back very quickly. It is also fascinating that you can use that chart to see how WWII impacted life expectancy, but again, not for a very long time.

[DrToast]

7. Herd immunity requirements are related to infectiousness

It doesn’t matter how new it is; it depends on how easily it spreads.

R0 = How many people each infected person infects on average

Herd immunity = 1 - (1/R0)