Washington: If the U.S. allowed the coronavirus to spread unchecked in an attempt to try to achieve so-called herd immunity, the “death toll would be enormous,” White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Thursday.
“If everyone contracted it, even with the relatively high percentage of people without symptoms … a lot of people are going to die,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told actor Matthew McConaughey during a live discussion on Instagram.
According to epidemiologists, herd immunity is necessary to contain a virus and is reached when enough of the population is either vaccinated or survive infection and build antibodies to ward of new infections. The virus then doesn’t have enough hosts to infect.
Most scientists think 60% to 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated or have natural antibodies to achieve herd immunity, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said last month.
The coronavirus, however, has infected less than 2% of the U.S. population and has already killed at least 166,970 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Letting the virus spread uncontrollably to achieve herd immunity would bring the death toll to a level that’s “totally unacceptable,” Fauci said. Americans tend to have more underlying conditions, like diabetes and obesity, that lead to more serious cases and even death from the coronavirus.
