It's a concept called herd immunity: Once enough people become immune to the novel coronavirus, it can't spread easily throughout the population. Vaccinations are necessary to create that kind of large-scale immunity, as the virus won't just disappear without a vaccine, according to Dr.
The old saying goes:"There's strength in numbers." And now, it turns out numbers may be the greatest defense against the spread of COVID-19.
"That is just not going to happen, because it's such a highly transmissible virus," Fauci said in his address to a Senate panel last Tuesday."Even if we get better control over the summer months, it is likely that there will be virus somewhere on this planet that will eventually get back to us." Could the United States reach a point where the novel coronavirus cannot easily spread? As public health officials battle an ever-expanding crisis, epidemiologists suggest there is still a long way to go before reaching herd immunity for COVID-19.
MORE: Dr. Anthony Fauci joins list of government officials entering self-quarantine over COVID-19 exposure"It's definitely not a long shot," Fauci said at last week's Senate hearing."It's clearly much more likely than not that somewhere in that time frame, we will get a vaccine for the virus." When someone becomes immune or stays physically distanced from others, it's harder for the virus to spread, and the average number of people that the virus can infect is lower. That new number, factoring in how susceptible the population is, is called the effective reproductive number.
Epidemiologists use a formula to calculate herd immunity based on the virus's basic reproduction number: /R0.Based on what experts know about the contagiousness of the novel coronavirus,"the critical threshold for achieving that herd protection for COVID-19 is between 50% and 66%," Dr. Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University told ABC News.
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