India’s slums are resisting the surge in coronavirus thanks to “collective immunity,” according to a new study.
About 57 percent of the nearly 7,000 people surveyed in the crowded slums of Mumbai were found to have antibodies in their blood, the highest immunity rate in the world, determined the study by local authorities and the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research. .
That compares to the immunity rate of 21.2 percent in the Big Apple in April and the 14 percent rate in Stockholm in May, Bloomberg News said.
“Mumbai’s slums may have achieved collective immunity,” said Jayaprakash Muliyil, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Epidemiology of India. “If people in Mumbai want a safe place to avoid infection, they should probably go there.”
“Collective immunity” works on the theory that the spread of COVID-19 is more rapidly neutralized if it is allowed to pass through the population, in contrast to established patterns of social distancing in much of the world.
Social distancing is practically impossible in the slums of Mumbai, which groups a San Francisco-like population in an area the size of Central Park, and where it’s not uncommon for a family of eight to live in a 100-square-foot room .
However, the slum has seen sharp declines in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, even as India has seen cases grow at one of the fastest rates in the world since April. The country now has 1.5 million confirmed cases of the deadly bug, with more than 34,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The researchers acknowledge that slums tend to have younger residents compared to the general population.
“One explanation is that they did an excellent job of containing it,” Muliyil said. “The other is that the herd’s immunity has been achieved.”
“The virus does its job,” he said. “The virus does not care about its quarantine and is much more efficient than its efforts to contain it.”
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