U-M disease expert answers: Can US reach herd immunity? - WDIV ClickOnDetroit

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ANN ARBOR – Since the first cases of COVID-19 began to spread around the country, the term herd immunity has been used to describe the best-case scenario to overcome the pandemic.

But with vaccine rates slowing down, the opportunity to attain widespread immunity from the virus slips further away.

Research assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, Abram Wagner, explained recently that herd immunity may be more complex than we thought and what roles vaccine availability and hesitancy play in achieving the nationwide goal.

The university released this Q&A addressing the topic:

Do you think herd immunity is attainable in the U.S.?

Wagner: Herd immunity is a theoretical concept in infectious disease epidemiology. It refers to what proportion of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to completely eliminate local transmission of disease, to snuff out outbreaks as they occur.

There’s a number of things that need to be true for this concept to actually work. There needs to be equal mixing of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in the population. And we know that that’s not the case in the U.S. There’s going to be some areas where there’s a higher percentage of the population vaccinated, in some areas less. And that could be due to access or could be due to a vaccine hesitancy.

The other thing is that children could be transmitting SARS-COV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. We’re not vaccinating children, so when we’re talking about attaining a certain proportion of the population vaccinated, we need to realize that we’re not even able to vaccinate the children at this point in time and it’ll be probably a few more months before a vaccine is readily available for all ages of children.

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U-M disease expert answers: Can US reach herd immunity? - WDIV ClickOnDetroit
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