by Fatihah
photo by WHO
As long as the world has not found a cure or a vaccine for Covid-19, we may have to adjust to a “new normal”, meaning a new way of living and going about our lives, work, and interactions with other people. Also, this new norm will stay with us for a very long time.
Many diseases caused by viruses have no cure to this day, not even the common cold. There are no vaccines for many viruses either. But we have learned to adapt our lifestyles to live with them. Look at HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). It has been around since the 1980s, and possibly even before then, although not as widespread.
To describes a state where a population is sufficiently immune to a certain infectious disease, so much so that the infection will not spread within the population. Herd immunity can be achieved by vaccination or by natural immunity. When enough people in the population cannot develop the infectious disease due to immunity, it also cannot spread to the more vulnerable people in the population, simply because there is not enough bacteria or virus going around.
photo by google
A virus with a reproductive rate of three needs 70% of the population to be immune to it in order to achieve herd immunity. As there is currently no vaccine available, it means that seven out of 10 people need to be infected before herd immunity can be achieved. So we may have achieved herd immunity to one of its mutations, but along might come another and we will have no immunity to it.
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