And maybe that's OK, according to these experts.
 | By Joanna Pearlstein Staff Editor, Opinion |
If you plotted the number of new Covid-19 cases reported in the United States each day since mid-December, when vaccines first became available, against the number of people vaccinated, you'd have a chart that would start to look something like a big X: Infections would be mapped on a downward slope from left to right, while the number of immunized people would be seen climbing over the same period. |
That big X illustrates exactly how effective the vaccines have been at reducing the spread of Covid-19. More than half of American adults are now fully vaccinated. |
When the pandemic began, scientists suggested that the herd immunity threshold for Covid-19 — the long-awaited state where enough people are immune to the coronavirus that the pandemic will finally be controlled — was 60 to 70 percent of the population. Experts have since revised that figure upward as they've learned more about the virus and as new variants have emerged. |
But with vaccines unavailable to much of the world, and with pockets of hesitancy limiting immunization levels in the United States, reaching the herd immunity threshold may remain beyond our grasp. |
Still, right now in the United States, we are seeing the benefits of herd immunity even before we hit the threshold. As three scientists who study infectious disease write in a guest essay today, it's not even clear that we need to achieve that state in order to escape the pandemic. |
The closer a community gets to the threshold, "the more transmission slows down, which benefits everyone," write Erin A. Mordecai, Mallory J. Harris and Marc Lipsitch. |
Since every person who catches Covid-19 can transmit it to several people, every shot in an arm can make that right side of the X a little bit taller, and get us just a skosh closer to ending the pandemic. |
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