Herd immunity alone won’t stop COVID-19. Here’s why.
Herd immunity is the point at which enough people in a population are immune to a disease—whether because they have already recovered from infection or been vaccinated—that the pathogen cannot easily spread through the community and cause new outbreaks. (Unsplash/)One of the White House’s top medical advisors has recommended that the administration adopt an approach to handling the pandemic that would allow the novel coronavirus to quickly infect massive numbers of people in hopes of reaching herd immunity, The Washington Post reported on August 31. The plan, reportedly advocated by Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has drawn swift criticism from infectious disease experts.“We’re talking about something that...basically would be relying upon an outbreak that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans,” says William Hanage, an epidemiologist in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health....