WORLD NEWS
Why are COVID-19 vaccines needed so badly?
First this disease is highly transmissible. It’s transmitted by the respiratory route, so people spread it easily in crowded places. Obviously, it’s incapacitating and deadly. Finally, effective vaccines are the most economical means to control a transmissible infectious disease.
Another reason that vaccines have a particularly special role is that this disease can be transmitted by asymptomatic and presymptomatic individuals. In other words, somebody doesn’t have to have a fever or be coughing in order to infect the people around them.
Without a vaccine and without broad immunity in a population, COVID-19 could very well become an endemic infection. That means it remains steady in the population, like chicken pox, and unlike other pathogens that cause outbreaks and then recede, such as Ebola or Zika.
Finally, as we’re experiencing, the economic and human impacts of COVID-19 are huge.
If enough people get the virus and recover, will we achieve so-called herd immunity?
That’s pretty unlikely. There would be a lot of lives lost before we achieved a percentage of immune people in the population sufficient to prevent community transmission. In so-called herd immunity, if a high proportion (70% to 95%) of the population is immune, then a person with the disease is unlikely to cause an outbreak. To achieve that level of immunity to COVID-19 in a community through natural infection, it would mean that nearly everyone in the community would need to be infected, and with a 1% mortality rate for COVID-19, that’s unacceptable





