With the COVID-19 vaccine rollout well underway, you might be wondering when we’ll be getting back to normal again. To get there, we’ll have to achieve herd immunity. Easy, right? Maybe not. Here’s what it will take us to get us there.
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(upbeat music)
– Ladies and gentlemen, Dorthy and her birds. – [Narrator] Remember
when things were normal? When you could do normal
stuff without a mask, without social distancing,
without worrying about COVID-19? So when can we get back to normal? For that, we’ll have to
achieve herd immunity. Herd in this case can apply
to any multitude of animals. We’ll just go with birds. The basic idea is pretty simple. In order to spread
viruses, to infect people. If enough people are immune,
they create a sort of barrier that keeps the virus from
finding new people to infect. And in the process protects people who aren’t immune. That’s herd immunity. The concept (cows mooing)
has been around for more than a century. In fact, one of the earliest
mentions came in 1921 from Oregon State University in reference to a nasty
bacterial disease in cows. – (indistinct) Got a blackleg vaccine to keep you (indistinct). – [Narrator] Figuring out
how many cows, humans, or any other animal need to be immune to protect the whole herd
depends on how infectious a disease is. This is the R value. It refers to how many
people each sick person is expected to pass the virus onto. A disease like Ebola has
an R value of around two. If nobody did anything to slow it down, a sick person would infect two others. Smallpox has an R-value of closer to four and this seemingly small
change makes a huge difference in how quickly each disease spreads. But everything turns around
when we get enough immunity to drop the R value below one. At that point, the virus
can’t spread as easily and it eventually fizzles out. The more infectious the disease, the more immune people we need to drop that R-value value down below one. With an R value of two, you
only have to cross 50% immunity. At R equals four, that herd
immunity goal rises to 75%. For COVID-19 estimates are
we’ll need at least 70% immunity to get us back to normal. For most of human history, the
only way to get herd immunity was to let the disease run its course. Basically let a lot of people die. Vaccines change that
calculus in a big way, providing a much safer way
for people to become immune. With vaccines, herd immunity
is not only possible, it’s within reach. Take Oregon for example. With the population topping 4 million, the state would need to have a little less than 3 million people immune to COVID-19 to reach herd immunity. At the end of January, 2021, there was about 140,000
confirmed coronavirus infections. That sets our vaccine goal
to around 2.8 million people to hit that 70%. At the state’s average,
late January vaccine rate of 16,000 doses per day, we’ll get there by December, 2021. Pretty straightforward? Nope. It’s never that easy. First off, the vaccine
hasn’t been approved for kids and teens under 16. That’s about 17% of Oregon’s population who can’t get vaccinated. That means 90% of the remaining
adults will need vaccines to hit herd immunity. And then there’s the coronavirus variants that have popped up, which
can be more infectious. And consider COVID-19 vaccines
top out at 95% effective, meaning more people will need it. And then the real wild card, we don’t know how long
the vaccines will last. Booster shots are being developed, but it’s possible that some people will start to lose vaccine immunity before the herd is protected. So normal keeps getting
pushed back, which is daunting and more than a little exhausting. But it’s not all bad. It’s highly likely that far more people have had COVID-19 than we know. So we have an added buffer
of natural immunity built in and all the work we’ve been doing, wearing masks and staying
socially distanced, it’s already significantly slowed how quickly coronavirus spreads. If we keep that up and
keep the vaccines coming, COVID cases and deaths
are going to plummet. When that happens, social
restrictions will start to relax and normal may become the norm
again, sooner than we think. – (indistinct) Dorthy and her
fabulous birds of the world.
