What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?

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In what may be the world’s most important math puzzle, researchers are trying to figure out how many people in a community must be immune before the coronavirus fades.

“At least in countries we applied it to, we could never get any signal that herd immunity thresholds are higher,” Dr. Gomes said. “I think it’s good to have this horizon that it may be just a few more months of pandemic.”

“Mathematically, it’s certainly possible to have herd immunity at these very, very low levels,” said Carl Bergstrom, an infectious disease expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Those are just our best guesses for what the numbers should look like.”Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., late last month. Fewer than 1 percent of people tested at neighborhood clinics in Brooklyn over the past eight weeks have had the virus.

That perspective also might help put a renewed focus on groups who require the higher levels of immunity, because of greater exposure levels and other inequities, including Black and Latino residents, said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. “That’s where this info is very useful,” he said.

Vaccination schemes for other pathogens have successfully exploited this approach. For example, when children were given the pneumococcal vaccine in the early 2000s, rates ofVaccines that offer just 50 percent protection are considered to be moderately effective, but at that efficiency, even a low herd immunity target would require that a large proportion of the population be immunized, Dr. Bergstrom noted.

 

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