What is herd immunity? I’m Dr. Frita. I’m a triple board-certified medical doctor, and today we’re going to discuss herd immunity. Imagine if a community or a herd of healthy people are introduced to an infectious disease. If all the population is vulnerable or susceptible to the disease, then you can imagine that the infection can spread through the community quite rapidly.
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This video is intended to be informational only. It is not a medical consultation, nor is it personalized medical advice. For medical advice, please consult your physician.
However, if the majority of the people have immunity to the disease, either by having been vaccinated, or if they have gotten sick, recovered, and now have antibodies to the infection, well, then the disease cannot spread very rapidly. In other words, if the majority of the community or the herd has immunity then that will protect the entire community, even the people who are not immunized.
This is herd immunity. There is a resistance to the spread of an infection due to most of the population having immunity. One of the great advantages of herd immunity is that, when the majority of people in a community are immunized against an infection, it protects even those who either make a choice not to get vaccinations or immunizations, and it also protects those who are unable to get immunizations such as the very elderly, the very young, or immunocompromised patients, such as patients on chemotherapy, or patients with certain autoimmune diseases.
Here are some examples of herd immunity, and I’ll use the United States as the example. Okay, so here in the U.S., we have achieved a herd immunity against the disease, polio. Why? Because most people in the U.S. have been immunized against polio. Therefore, we don’t typically see polio. It’s not able to spread because most people are immune. So even people in the U.S. who have not received a polio vaccination are not likely to get the disease because it does not typically exist in our community or our herd. Another example of herd immunity is to MMR, the MMR vaccination, measles, mumps, and rubella. So measles, for example, we have achieved a herd immunity with measles. Most people have been immunized against measles, so we don’t tend to see measles as an epidemic. We have, however, had an outbreak of measles in the U.S., there has been a breakdown of our herd immunity.
So in order for herd immunity to exist, the majority of people in the community must be immunized or have gained immunity against a disease. So how do we actually go about the business of achieving herd immunity in the community for specific diseases? Well, I’ve given you a general overview, a general definition of herd immunity, but we actually can calculate how to achieve that protection, that herd immunity for specific diseases by using specific formulas. Yes, we have it down to a science and we’re able to do it based on a number, R0 (pronounced R Naught). So what in the world is, R0? R0 refers to, how many people within a community can get sick from one infected person. So yes, the R0 refers to how transmissible infection is. It does not talk about how deadly an infection is or how sick an infection will make you, it simply refers to how easily one person who’s infected can spread the infection to other people.
Some of the ways that we are mitigating the infection are based on the CDC and the World Health Organization recommendations. They recommend social distancing, staying at very least, six feet apart from a person to decrease the chances of transmitting the infection.
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