Herd Immunity And Covid-19 . What You Need To Know?

What is herd Immunity?

In this hard time of Covid 19, you all will be extremely depressed with the everyday challenge. While health officials are busy working to get some solution for the suddenly increased cases of covid, they believe herd immunity is a possible way to cure this disease. It’s herd immunity that may decrease covid cases and bring relief among the suffering population. Here in this blog post, let’s learn what is herd immunity and how it helps to bring down the covid cases.

Herd Immunity

Herd immunity or community immunity occurs when a large group of community is immune to a certain disease. The herd immunity prevents the further spreading of diseases from people to people. This results in the whole community being safe along with those who are immune.

It’s the way through which the infection drops and the disease peters out. So those with weak immune systems are saved and the herd or community is free from the danger zone.

The part of the community the needs to be immune to achieve herd immunity depends from disease to diseases. The more contagious disease is, the more percentage of immune people it requires to prevent its spreading. For example, 94% of the population needs to be immune to be safe from measles as estimated.

How to achieve herd Immunity?

Herd immunity for covid can be achieved in two ways:

1 By natural infection

Achieving herd immunity through natural infection means that a community had already suffered through the disease and recovered back. Now the biological process that takes place over here is that when your body is exposed to covid 19 or any other disease, it makes antibodies. Antibodies fight off the infection and your body keeps these antibodies to defend against further infection.

Examples

•  By natural infection, the Zika virus outbreak was brought to control in Brazil according to the researchers.
• Those who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) were later immune to the infection with the H1N1 flu.

The drawbacks of relying on community infection to create herd immunity are many, among them, some are:-

• The covid virus is a new one and enough research has been going over it for a year by now. It’s not even clear whether the infection with the covid virus makes a person immune to further infection. Hence, further research is needed in this case.
• To reach herd immunity, a large number of people needed to be infected for creating long-lasting immunity. Experts suggest that in the US nearly 70% of the population needs recovery from this Coronavirus in order to halt this epidemic.
• If many people become sick at once, the health care system will be overwhelmed, resulting in severe complications and death.

2. Vaccines

The vaccine is another way to achieve herd immunity by making your body think a virus or bacteria has infected it already. Without getting sick your immune system makes antibodies protecting against covid. Thus, the next time your body gets infected your body is ready to fight it off.

Vaccines had successfully worked to treat the contagious disease like polio, smallpox and many others in the past.

The vaccines have their own drawbacks in reading herd immunity such as:-

• Protection from some vaccines wanes with time according to vaccines updates. This may require revaccination.
• Sometimes people don’t take all the shots that are must to be covid free. Vaccines progress is thus not beneficial.
• Vaccines can have drastic effects too. Thus vaccine news is quite negative.

The ones who didn’t get vaccination, benefit from this procedure as well.

So whenever possible, it’s good to get vaccinated. Vaccination is safe for you and those around you. Apart from it, some daily tips to avoid covid are:-

•  Avoid close contact with the sick. i.e., showing covid symptoms.
• Keep at least 2 meters distance to be safe, especially if you have a higher risk of illness.
• Avoid crowds and poorly ventilated places.
• Wash hands properly with soaps.
• Wear your mask in public places.
• Cover properly while sneezing and coughing
• Do not touch eyes, nose, and mouth
• Avoid sharing household items if you are sick.
• Avoid public transport and stay safe at home.
• Sanitize frequently.

Precautions are better than cure. The covid increasing its pace and thus it’s urgent to sacrifice and follow these hard rules strictly.

This disease won’t run out on its own, you are the change that can deal with this infection. Staying hard on yourselves is thus a need. So herd immunity will definitely bring a positive change. Therefore be positive and pull up your socks to face the coming challenges positively.

Normal Human Body Temperature| Low v/s High