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There is a consensus among several experts worldwide that the COVID-19 pandemic will only end with the establishment of collective immunity.
This happens when enough people in a community are protected from a pathogen. The more immune people are, the more likely it is that people who carry the virus will only come in contact with people who cannot become infected, ending the spread, Bloomberg reports.
When mass immunization begins depends on how contagious the pathogen is, which is measured by what experts call the “basic reproductive number” or R0.
R0 is simply the average number of people to whom a carrier will transmit the disease in a population where no one is immune, so an R0 of 3 would mean that an infected person spreads the disease to three other people.
The higher the R0, the greater the proportion of the population that must be immune to stop the spread of the virus, reports ABC News.
The “mirage” of mass immunization
For COVID-19, we are still not sure what R0 is, so we do not yet know what the herd immunity threshold is. For now, it is estimated between 70 and 90%.
Therefore, taking the United States as an example, to reach even the lower extremity of this range, naturally, 230 million Americans would have to become infected, and many of them would automatically die.
Achieving this collective immunity in the absence of a vaccine can be influenced by a number of variables, including: How infectious is the disease? How deadly is the virus? How long do immune patients stay once they get rid of the virus? Adjusting any of these variables can dramatically change the result of the equation.
Why can’t we be so easily immune to disease? There are some things that could happen. Our bodies can stop killing the virus entirely, allowing it to remain dormant and reappear later (HIV is the case).
The virus could evolve enough that our old antibodies no longer work, or the immune response we produce could fade too quickly, making us susceptible to reinfection almost immediately.
A vaccine, only in 2021
A vaccine to combat the new coronavirus could be approved in about a year, in an “optimistic” scenario, an agency that approves drugs for the European Union announced Thursday.
As the world rushes to find a vaccine, the European Union, badly affected by COVID-19, fears it may not have enough supplies, especially if a vaccine is developed in the United States or China.
The European Medicines Agency, in communication with 33 developers, is doing everything possible to speed up the approval process, the head of this institution, Marco Cavaleri, according to Reuters.
More than 100 vaccine projects worldwide.
There are more than 100 COVID-19 vaccine projects worldwide, eight of which have gone into clinical trials, according to data published by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
This renowned medical school in the UK has counted almost 120 different vaccine projects against the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, of which 110 are in a “preclinical” stage of development.
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