Without a vaccine, herd immunity won’t save us. Via FiveThirtyEight:
“The higher the proportion in a population that is infected, the fewer places there are for that virus to go, the fewer people are susceptible to being transmitted,” said Greta Bauer, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “That makes sense, right? If one person, on average, infects two other people but half the population is immune, they’re only going to be able to infect one other person.
And reaching herd immunity as the outbreak is raging is a completely different scenario than, for example, doing so after a vaccine has been created. With a vaccine, you can immunize people before they’ve encountered the virus, so by the time the virus gets to a vaccinated population, it has nowhere to spread. But in an active outbreak, even once the herd immunity threshold is reached, the infection keeps going.
So think of crossing the herd immunity threshold as determining the fate of the disease rather than its status . Typically, when we encounter a new pathogen, our immune system mounts a defense that includes producing antibodies to fight off the infection. Afterward, some of those antibodies and immune cells hang around, allowing our body to “remember” the offending microbe and more easily fend it off in the future.
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