how is "sufficient overall immunity" aka herd immunity going to be reached? a combination of vaccines and infections. How will we get there if 40% refuse vaccines and we also prevent them from being infected?
Uh, we're definitely going for herd immunity. The bar for that is actually quite close to being met in some countries, including the US (if you combine past infections and vaccinated people).
It's been estimated that 80% of the population needs to have been infected to achieve herd immunity. That means ~240 million people in the United States need to be infected. We're at 8.7 million infected. No way we get herd immunity anytime soon.
At that R0 herd immunity will be probably achieved when at least 70% of the population is infected. So it’s not all, but we are still speaking of about 5.5 billion people globally...
Very difficult to get herd immunity up to a decent enough level without putting the vulnerable portion of the population in great danger though. Most countries are approaching something like 0.1% or 0.2% of the population having been infected. Herd immunity requires 70% - 80% immunity. About 350x - 800x more than what's happened already.
Also the whole thing presumes that immunity is lasting. Some of the data is showing that may not be the case.
Currently around ~5% of the US has contracted COVID. 60-70% of the population needs to become infected in order to gain herd immunity. Meaning we're about 7% of the way to herd immunity. We still have a long way to go.
Herd immunity hasn't been achieved anywhere and with around a half percent infection fatality rate that doesn't seem like something you would like to get to.
We hopefully would reach herd immunity far before that point, but even with herd immunity only requiring 70% of Americans to be infected, we're looking at over 2m fatalities. And that's not even counting the hospitalizations that will be over 20M.
What we need to hope for is an unlikely vaccine, or a therapeutic treatment to mitigate the worst of the diseases effects.
Basically, there are reasonable estimates that the range could be anywhere from 20% - 70%.
The effect also greatly depends on which portion of the population gets vaccinated. If (in an imaginary world) the most at-risk 50% of the population got vaccinated, we could reasonably expect Covid to actually become something like the flu.
Finally, I expect this is something that'll gain acceptance over time. There are some not unreasonable factors that could cause people to be nervous about a Covid vaccine initially, that will be softened over time. Things like it being developed under the supervision of politicians who could be motivated to rush it out, or just being developed faster than any vaccine ever.
Or, on the flipside, continued travel restrictions for individuals who haven't been vaccinated. Americans traveling to certain tropical countries have been required to get specific vaccines for years, I wouldn't be surprised if over the next few, travel to Europe or even Canada requires a Covid vaccine.
I am not so sure herd immunity is a goal. The idea is indeed to avoid overrunning the healthcare system, with an expectation that we can get the majority of the population successfully through the system. It's not well-known that we'll build even short term immunity, let alone long to medium term immunity.
If new cases flatline, that's good! If we can avoid everyone getting it, that's even better! If the globe can get a handle on things, we don't need to solely consider worst-case scenarios.
Explain what you mean by "herd immunity"? It is normally achieved through vaccination; if you mean "wait until most of the population has had the disease", you'd need to wait until the US death toll was much higher to achieve that.
Doesn’t herd immunity for a country of 350 million need somewhere on the order of 220 million to have been exposed and recovered? I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet.
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