The coronavirus is here to stay - here’s what that means The COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech, for example, are extremely effective at preventing symptomatic disease, but it is still unclear whether they protect people from becoming infected, or from spreading the virus to others. The key to herd immunity is that, even if a person becomes infected, there are too few susceptible hosts around to maintain transmission - those who have been vaccinated or have already had the infection cannot contract and spread the virus. It’s unclear whether vaccines prevent transmission Here are some of the reasons behind this mindset, and what they mean for the next year of the pandemic.
But in the near term, scientists are contemplating a new normal that does not include herd immunity. Long-term prospects for the pandemic probably include COVID-19 becoming an endemic disease, much like influenza. But as new variants arise and immunity from infections potentially wanes, “we may find ourselves months or a year down the road still battling the threat, and having to deal with future surges”. “The vaccine will mean that the virus will start to dissipate on its own,” Meyers says.
This shift reflects the complexities and challenges of the pandemic, and shouldn’t overshadow the fact that vaccination is helping. “We’re moving away from the idea that we’ll hit the herd-immunity threshold and then the pandemic will go away for good,” says epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers, executive director of the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Gu is a data scientist, but his thinking aligns with that of many in the epidemiology community. He said that reaching a herd-immunity threshold was looking unlikely because of factors such as vaccine hesitancy, the emergence of new variants and the delayed arrival of vaccinations for children. In February, independent data scientist Youyang Gu changed the name of his popular COVID-19 forecasting model from ‘Path to Herd Immunity’ to ‘Path to Normality’. But as the pandemic enters its second year, the thinking has begun to shift. Most estimates had placed the threshold at 60–70% of the population gaining immunity, either through vaccinations or past exposure to the virus. That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse, herd immunity would permit society to return to normal. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to block most transmission - a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ - is starting to look unlikely. As COVID-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties.
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