Coronavirus cases in the city of Manaus, Brazil, are in decline, and experts suspect it is because many other people there have already stuck COVID-19 which is now too complicated for the virus to spread to other people.
If so, Manaus would have achieved what is called herd immunity, Popular Science reports, that is, so many other people in a region expand resistance or immunity to a disease that even those who have not gotten sick as a result.
In a new preprinted study, a team of scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil concluded that about 66. 1% of the citizens of Manaus had been inflamed with COVID-19 at some point, which is the percentage that epidemiologists in the past predicted to identify collective immunity.
But since the review has not yet been peer-reviewed or officially published, and because other points, such as masking and distance, can contribute to the decrease in cases, scientists are still undecided.
“It’s a bit tricky to know if it’s a natural herd immunity to a mix of things,” Dr. Thomas Russo, an infectious disease expert at the University at Buffalo who did not describe the new study, told PopSci. “But it is”. intriguing indeed. “
It should be noted that the pursuit of collective immunity as a plan of reaction to a pandemic in the United States would be devastating, despite the insistence of some politicians that this is the right way forward. a national death toll of millions, a massive leap from the already horrific 201253 lives lost in the country.
“There will be an excess of death and almost an excess of medium- and long-term fitness consequences,” Russo added.
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