New research on herd immunity carried out by researchers at the University of Texas and The Santa Fe Institute has claimed that the threshold of such immunity is much higher than previously speculated.

Herd immunity is achieved when a large portion of the population develops antibodies against any disease. Usually, highly infectious diseases have a high threshold. This includes measles, and chickenpox, among others.

Also read: Covid-19: Natural immunity or vaccine-induced protection?

For the new study, published in the journal medRxiv*, researchers obtained the code used by the earlier study from the open-access GIT Hub. They further studied the two forms of mitigation curves ― timing and magnitude of transmission reduction via non-pharmacological interventions.

Findings and implications

Their new mathematical model found that Covid-19 herd immunity estimates are as high as 60 per cent to 80 per cent.

This reveals that a high proportion of the population needs to be immune to the infection, either by getting infected (active immunity) or by vaccination, to protect the remaining non-immune population.

Also read: Less than 4% of Wuhan residents report Covid antibodies: Report

This finding has significant implications on present policies that propose relaxing the mitigation measures, said the researchers.

The team wrote: “Our re-estimates of the Covid-19 HIT corroborate strong signals in the data and compelling arguments that most of the globe remains far from herd immunity, and suggest that abandoning community mitigation efforts would jeopardise the welfare of communities and integrity of healthcare systems.”

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