But back to the pressing question,
Will Mass. achieve herd immunity?
Massachusetts’ coronavirus vaccination campaign has been among the most successful in the country, with 57.3 percent of residents — 3.9 million people — having received at least a first shot of the vaccines as of earlier this week, according to federal data.
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In a Twitter thread earlier this week, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, noted that Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and South Dakota have already reached about 70 percent population immunity, when you count immunity through infections. “They might get to 80 percent before long,” he wrote.
“We won’t be done even if we get to 80%,” Jha added. “We’ll need to monitor variants, vaccinate the world, continue testing, etc. . . . But this is all manageable. We’ll settle into a new equilibrium as we do with many viruses.”
80% is the magic number that experts are now coalescing around.
How depressed should we be if we can’t reach herd immunity?
If herd immunity is never achieved, said BC’s Landrigan, “COVID will continue to smolder in the population — endemic transmission — and we will have to hope that no new, resistant strain of the virus emerges.”
Still, the benefits of vaccination are clear.
Even if Massachusetts doesn’t attain herd immunity, Jha wrote on Twitter, as the state gets into summer and fall, “infection numbers will be low, vaccinated folks will be mainly safe, and with better treatment infections may become less problematic. And life will return to a recognizable normal. And that’ll be good.”
Bhadelia, from BU, cautioned, “We need to drive the number down through vaccination this summer because it’s possible cases may go up again during winter due to possible seasonality of this virus.”
So we're doing better than most of the rest of the world, but
“We don’t live in a microcosm,” said Boucher, the Tufts physician. “You can’t say we have herd immunity when people come in and out.”
Even if Massachusetts does well in stopping COVID-19, the virus could make its way back into the state if it is still circulating around the country and the world, the experts said.
But, Hanage said, “If population immunity can be kept high enough, then it won’t cause large outbreaks.
Bhadelia noted that if the virus keeps getting imported into the state, chances increase that it will encounter people who cannot mount a good immune response, and that new variants will reduce vaccine effectiveness.
“At the end of the day, we’re all connected,” said Dowdy, from Johns Hopkins. “As long as the virus is transmitting in one jurisdiction, reintroduction and outbreaks will be a possibility in all jurisdictions.”
I'll be 100% vaccinated by then, but it doesn't seem like the best idea in the world...
