ABC15 Health Insider breaks down how herd immunity works and how it is achieved.
[Music] 6 44 now and since the start of this pandemic there’s been a lot of talk about herd immunity and the best ways to achieve it vaccinations and natural spread of the disease help us get there but before we talk about achieving herd immunity we first must understand what herd immunity is new this morning our abc 15 health insider team is helping to break it all down for us herd immunity is the idea that even though one individual may not have gotten protected from an infection or may not have had that infection the more people in their herd or group that do have protection to that infection the less likely they are to get it so when the majority of people have protection from an infection the herd is less likely to transmit that infection it sounds simple enough as explained by experts at johns hopkins university but getting to herd immunity in our current pandemic anything but easy and how do we achieve herd immunity for covet 19. herd immunity is also based on how many how contagious is a virus so for example there’s certain diseases where we need about 90 of the community sort of it from the the via from a virus you know the measles for example is highly highly contagious there’s other viruses that you might only need 80 currently the i believe the cutoffs for the coronavirus is about 70 to 75 percent to receive that herd immunity given how transmissible or contagious the virus is that’s the goal of this vaccine site and others across the state reach herd immunity through protecting people who haven’t already had covet experts say it would save more lives than simply letting kovitz spread like wildfire in the population but dr payush gupta explains herd immunity isn’t a cure-all covet-19 could still spread in our community but not nearly as easily as it once did not stop it but it’s going to slow it down significantly there’ll still be a risk that people that don’t have that aren’t immune to the virus can they can still get it but the risk is much lower because it’s less prevalent in our communities he does a great job of explaining it so the interesting thing about herd immunity is that like the name suggests it doesn’t just protect you it protects all of us the less likely you are to get sick the less likely you are to spread that disease to somebody else now is there a question or story that you want to see our health insider team look into email us at healthinsider at abc15.com
