Don’t bank on herd immunity

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Don’t bank on herd immunity

Tuesday, 26 May 2020 | Kota Sriraj

The COVID-19 is still an evolving virus whose behaviour cannot be predicted astutely at this stage

With India slowly lifting the Coronavirus-necessitated lockdown in a graded manner, the number of people entering the economy, too, is rapidly climbing. Day two of lockdown 4.0 saw a 40 per cent spike in traffic levels in the country, which in many ways reflects the impatience and frustration of the common man with the current restrictions.

However, this gradual return to normalcy and easing of restrictions is not without risk and the country saw a major spike in Coronavirus cases and casualties after May 18. Though, the fear of the pandemic is writ large on the faces of the people and is reflected in their behaviour, too, the need to salvage livelihoods is equally compelling.

In trying times such as these, new concepts are being relied upon and referred to in order to allay the fears of the citizens venturing out into the world after months of being confined indoors. “Herd immunity” is one such concept that we are hearing about more and more these days. But like any other concept, herd immunity, too, needs to be understood properly and more importantly related correctly to the Indian context.

Usually, the human body reacts against a contagious virus such as the COVID-19 by developing antibodies. In the process it becomes immune to the virus and is naturally protected, thereafter. If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and become immune to it that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the contagion finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host.

But, the fact of the matter is that herd immunity will make a lot of people sick. It will also cause a lot of casualties as many will succumb to the pandemic. Plus, it is a long-drawn process and under some demographic conditions, it may take years to work out. For precisely these reasons the concept of herd immunity must not be peddled as an insurance against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a highly-populated country such as India, where awareness and education levels are still a work in progress, misinterpretation or insufficient awareness regarding an important concept such as herd immunity can have a devastating effect. Through every possible communication medium, it must be conveyed to the people that they are still in the shadow of COVID-19 and lack of awareness, ignorance and complacency can result in more and more infections.

Herd immunity is an organic process that has its evolution and time-frame and governments cannot use herd immunity as a management tool for COVID-19. Recently, this aspect was also highlighted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) which remarked that people cannot be made “magically” immune to the Coronavirus.

The WHO’s procedure for utilising the concept of herd immunity is appreciable and must be adopted by State authorities as well. According to the WHO, herd immunity is generally used in calculating how many people will need to be vaccinated in a population in order to protect those who are not vaccinated. In the present case, there is no tested and proven vaccine for the Coronavirus as yet, so it is highly risky to base the process of “getting back to normal” on herd immunity.

Experts at the WHO have further opined that the sero-epidemiological studies are proving that the overall infected population in relation to the total population of the world is small, which means that we still have a long way to go in the fight against the virus. The notion of herd immunity must also not be allowed to take root in the public consciousness and least of all provide a false sense of security. This is essential, because it has been noted that the antibodies to COVID-19 which are IgG and IgM, usually start to develop within two-three weeks of infection. However, some people do not develop an adequate humoral immune response, leading to a severity of infection that indirectly impacts the overall immunity of a group or herd. This again proves that herd immunity cannot be a bankable concept at this stage of the contagion.

Yet another aspect that undermines the strategy of herd immunity is the issue of how long the antibodies neutralising the virus would last in humans. As per research estimates, these antibodies usually last for 40 days after the onset of symptoms. In the case of the 2002 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)  virus, the levels of IgG antibody stayed high for nearly four months.

But what exactly will happen in the case of the COVID-19, how long the antibodies will stay efficient in the infected person, one cannot say at the moment. This directly means that the chance of reinfection is considerable and we have already seen this to be true in many countries. The COVID-19 is still an evolving virus whose behaviour cannot be predicted astutely at this stage, so every effort must be made to ensure that no experimentation is done with concepts such as herd immunity unless scientific evidence merits the same, because it is too big a risk to take in an overpopulated country like ours.

 (The writer is an environmental journalist)

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