March 8, 2021 Group Watch: AL Could Reach Herd Immunity in May
An epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham projected that the country, and Alabama, could reach herd immunity to COVID-19 as early as May or June. Dr. Suzanne Judd said her calculations are based on the current pace of delivering COVID-19 vaccines and a recent study from Columbia University that estimated more than a third of the U.S. population may have already been infected with the virus by the end of January. Herd immunity occurs when the virus cannot spread through a population uncontrolled because enough members of the population have some kind of immunity, either from a vaccine or from antibodies if they had the disease and recovered. There is a strong belief that a large but unknown number of people who got the virus were never tested. Judd says that although there is no magical number for herd immunity, her calculations are based on a threshold of getting immunity in 72 percent of the population.
