"herd immunity"

[solarbird]

If anyone I follow still considers COVID-19 "herd immunity" viable without a well-distributed vaccine, consider the diseases we did not eliminate without them:

Mumps. Measles. Rubella. Typhoid. Scarlet fever. Smallpox. Diphtheria. More.

Not even diseases as relatively benign as chicken pox or as vicious and feared as polio got eliminated without vaccines.

"Herd immunity" without vaccines is nothing but "eh, let 'em die."

What is herd immunity and why are Trump officials pursuing an idea WHO calls ‘dangerous’?

Comments

Exactly as you say.

[kathmandu]

Right, that's been my thought too. Reporters etc. currently seem to be talking about 'herd immunity' as 'enough people immune that outbreaks can eventually peter out, without flaring into epidemics', but I always understood it as 'so many people are immune that the few who could catch it are protected by the enormous herd of immune and therefore non-transmitting people around them, who act as a buffer to the rare active case'.

And as you say, we've never achieved that, for anything, without vaccines.

On the other hand, we could wipe Covid out the old-fashioned way. We have a good enough handle on how it's transmitted now that we could use precautions consistently in public, test all travelers (including truckdrivers, politicians, and 'driving to the next town over for errands or visits'), quarantine everyone who tests positive until they are definitely not contagious any more. We could wipe this thing out in three or four months if we were determined.

[oh6]

I'd only seen "herd immunity" mentioned in the context of vaccination, before now.

[solarbird]

Then you've missed a lot of it. That was the original UK strategy, for example, straight up. Rightists here were pushing it hard, and are sneaking back to it. And fascists of course want it outright, because they actively want the deaths - a 'thinning of the herd' and all that.

[kevin_standlee]

As I mentioned to you on Twitter, I (born in the mid-1960s) was unfortunate enough to catch scarlet fever around 1972. It was Not Fun. Even chicken pox (which my sister Kelli and I had either the previous or following year; I can't remember) was less bad. I do remember how surprised my current doctor was when we were doing my second shingles vaccination and I mentioned that I'd had scarlet fever. He said he didn't think he'd ever had a single patient who had ever had it.

Astonishingly, my grandparents (with whom I lived at that time) were able to keep me sufficiently away from my sister (three years younger than me) so that she didn't catch it from me. Presumably I was treated with antibiotics, although I have no memory of it, being rather miserable the entire course of the disease, and took no long-term harm from it. My most intense memory of the experience was that I would wake up not being able to open my eyes when waking up because they were "glued" shut by excess eye mucus ("sleep dust"). I'd have to call my grandmother, who would come clean my eyes with warm water so I could open them.

thanks for the nightmare fuel

[solarbird]

Yep. That eye thing would nightmare me right the fuck out. I'll be over here -----> sedating myself. xD