Tag Archives: Herd immunity

Michael Head, University of Southampton There have been many predictions about how many people have had COVID-19 and whether or not this or that country has reached herd immunity. We have seen this before in Manaus, Brazil, and in India. The optimism is alas always misplaced and occasionally used irresponsibly. We have seen approaches to naturally acquired herd immunity proposed …

Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford; Jonathan Pugh, University of Oxford, and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford Moderna and Pfizer have released data suggesting that their vaccines are well tolerated in adolescents and highly effective in preventing COVID-19. Canada, the US and the EU have already authorised the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12. And the UK has just …

Adam Kleczkowski, University of Strathclyde Now that Britain and the US are crossing the 50% threshold of their populations vaccinated with the first dose, are they reaching herd immunity and can things return to normal soon? Not yet, is the short answer. And focusing on a single number is not helpful. It might encourage behaviour that would lead to another …

Rodney E. Rohde, Texas State University U.S. Census Bureau, CC BY-ND It may be summer before children under 16 can be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States. That’s a problem for reaching herd immunity quickly. Children are a significant portion of the population – roughly 65 million are under the age of 16, making up 20% of people in …

Simple steps like wearing a face mask can lower the risk of getting COVID-19 for the wearers and those around them. Jennah Moon/Getty Images Melissa Burdi, Purdue University As temperatures fall, people are spending more time indoors. That heightens the risk of the coronavirus spreading, but there are some simple steps you can take to help protect yourself and everyone …

The search goes on. Shutterstock/Orpheus FX Lynn Williams, University of Strathclyde Vaccination will be hugely important in controlling future waves of COVID-19. But for it to work, we will need high levels of public acceptance of a vaccine, if and when it eventually becomes available. In recent years, vaccination rates have fallen across the world, and public confidence in vaccines …

Shutterstock / OPOLJA Salvador Peiró, Fisabio La respuesta sueca a la COVID-19 ha sido mucho menos intensa que en cualquier otro país europeo, incluyendo sus vecinos nórdicos. Suecia no sólo eludió los confinamientos generalizados sino que mantuvo abierta la escuela primaria, continúa desaconsejando el uso de mascarillas (salvo situaciones específicas) y hasta hace poco mantenía sin aislar a los contactos …

Gordon Dougan, University of Cambridge Two years ago, I visited the Brazilian city of Manaus at the start of a trip through the Amazon. Since my childhood, I had been fascinated by this dot on the map that sits at the centre of the Amazon basin at the confluence of the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers. The city is ultra …

hobbit/Shutterstock Adam Kleczkowski, University of Strathclyde Nearly 100 years ago, two British researchers, William Topley and Graham Wilson, were experimenting with bacterial infections in mice. They noticed that individual survival depended on how many of the mice were vaccinated. So the role of the immunity of an individual needed to be distinguished from the immunity of the entire herd. Fast …