The spread of the newest virus, Covid-19, has captivated and traumatized many who stay glued to network news accounts. But rather than relying on a magic vaccine to save humanity, we're finding our way through the 'gauntlet' by protecting our elders and infirmed, while our young & healthy are taking the brunt of the viral attack. Most are surviving the illness with little harm. Some experience no symptoms at all.
By all accounts, Oklahoma is handling the illness far better than our 'more enlightened' coastal states. One could say that Gov. Stitt's goal of Top Ten may be occuring in a category which truly means life or death for each of us.
It may be very advantageous for individuals to face the inevitability of a covid exposure in the months when the annual flu isn't already taxing our bodies as well as the communal healthcare resources.
But Dennis Thompson of Healthday believes that our illusive herd immunity threshold far sooner than what vaccine innoculations required. He've pasted part of that article for your review...
THURSDAY, July 2, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Could young people going out and partying be the key to limiting the spread of COVID-19?
Possibly, as a new mathematical model argues that herd immunity might be achieved with fewer people becoming immune through infection than was believed, if you take into account how the virus would spread among younger, more socially active folks.
The model estimates that herd immunity could occur after 43% of the population becomes immune to COVID-19 by passing the disease from person to person, far lower than the 60% to 70% figure that epidemiologists have held out as the gold standard.
This estimate is based on the argument that younger and more socially active people are the main spreaders of infectious disease, and therefore will contribute more to herd immunity after they've been infected and gotten over COVID-19, said lead researcher Tom Britton, a professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Traditional estimates for herd immunity are based on vaccination, and assume that everyone in a community is equally likely to achieve immunity by getting inoculated.
But those estimates are flawed because they don't take into account the herd immunity achieved from a disease spreading through a community, Britton and his researchers argued.
"When immunity instead comes from having been infected, then immunity is more spread among the outgoing people exposing themselves and others to the disease more," Britton continued. "This latter immunity is hence distributed in a more efficient manner, which in turn implies that fewer are needed to reach herd immunity.
"Immunity coming from disease exposure is spread more among more socially active people, which makes the effect stronger than the corresponding immunity level when performing vaccination," Britton summed up.