The World Health Organization advised public officials against trying to achieve so-called herd immunity to the coronavirus by allowing it to rapidly spread throughout their communities, saying it will overwhelm hospitals and kill a lot of people.
Herd immunity is necessary to really contain a virus, according to epidemiologists. That is generally achieved once enough people either get vaccinated or survive the virus so they have the antibodies to fight off new infections and the virus doesn’t have enough new hosts to spread.
Simply waiting for herd immunity to happen by allowing the virus to spread, as some opponents of social distancing measures have suggested, is dangerous, said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program.
“The idea that we would have herd immunity as an objective, in some sense, it goes against controlling the disease because if you were to say, ‘We need to have a herd immunity of 70% and we should let the virus spread until we get to 70%,’ we’ve seen what happens,” he said. “Hospitals get overwhelmed. A lot of people die.”
