LONDON: Logistics permitting, about 15 million people in the UK will have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by some time in February.
An unhappy combination of imperfect vaccine efficacy, suboptimal take-up and super-infectious variants could derail attempts to reach the herd immunity threshold, when R falls below one and the virus begins to dissipate. Modelling from the University of East Anglia corroborates this unpalatable possibility.Another major worry is that countries with poorly controlled transmission might be acting as production lines for dangerous new variants.
“We had an open discussion in the group recently about why these variants were emerging independently in so many places,” Prof de Oliveira says. If regions with raging transmission do act as breeding grounds for resistant variants, then failing to control spread will prolong the pandemic.
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