Everyone is looking for the miracle that will put an end to our hard times caused by the deadly virus COVID-19. Among various suggestions, some have considered advocating the idea of herd community as the answer for Covid-19; this suggests to let the disease spread unchecked and unrestrained to reach the point where a large number of populations are immune to the concerned disease, either because they have recovered from an infection or received a vaccine.
According to Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University, who runs the Emergent Epidemics Lab, herd immunity is not the cure for Covid-19 and it would not work anytime soon; as one of the reasons being the delay in the invention of the vaccine. Scarpino was in an online seminar as a part of a series presented by the University of Maryland’s network biology program, in partnership with the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, where he spoke about the questionable estimation of the governments who believe that seventy to eighty percentage of the population would be infected and immune by the unchecked wave of disease and there will be no further subsequent waves. However, Scarpino mentioned that those estimations are way too high.
More likely by this strategy, there will be multiple waves, and only five to twenty per cent of people will be affected by the disease that will result in costing many lives. Scarpino also talked about the basic reproductive number or RO of SARS-CoV-2 which is between two and three, meaning each infected person will infect between two and three others, on average. Nonetheless, Scarpino thinks these estimations to be dubious considering the pictures of the influenza pandemic in 1918 and outbreak of Ebola in West Africa around 2013, where the affected numbers of people were different despite having the same RO.
In another scenario, the herd community strategy would not work as many people have confided into their home long before the social distancing measures were declared in order to save their lives as well as their loved ones.
Rubena Bose