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Will the US reach “herd immunity” before Christmas?

Fernando Lanzer
5 min readNov 29, 2020

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Photo by author.

We are getting closer to finding out if two big assumptions made by some epidemiologists back in March 2020 are true or not. If these assumptions turn out to be true, the US will reach “herd immunity” to Covid-19 just before Christmas and the spread of the SarsCov-2 virus will stop (or be reduced dramatically) regardless of vaccination.

A similar process will happen in all countries seriously affected.

Big assumption #1: If 70% of a population gets the virus, it will stop spreading due to “herd immunity.” That is a big “if,” because the epidemiologists who made those statements based those assertions on their observations of cattle being vaccinated against certain illnesses. The idea is that if you inoculate 70% of a herd with a vaccine, that will create enough immunity to stop the disease from infecting the remaining individuals.

Making that analogy from cattle to people; and from vaccinating 70% of a population in a week to catching a disease over a twelve-month period is quite a leap. These things can be quite different… we don’t know if the assumption is correct.

We are about to find out, however. 70% of the US population is roughly 231.7 million people. When this amount of the population has caught the virus, we will know if there is subsequently a dramatic drop in the…

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Fernando Lanzer
Fernando Lanzer

Written by Fernando Lanzer

Consultant on Leadership Development, Managing Across Cultures, Leading Change. Author of “Take Off Your Glasses.”

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