What does it mean to get group immunity?

Will we all have covid? Put simply, there are two main properties of a virus; 1) how infectious it is 2) how deadly it is.

Even if a virus is too infectious, if it is also too deadly, this is an advantage for the humanity.

Sounds weird? Let me explain…

Because, when this virus infects someone, the patient gets so sick that he/she needs to be hospitalised and in some cases, the patient dies. So the possibility to infect somebody else becomes limited.

Let’s look at the less deadly but still infectious. In this case, since most of the cases, the infected bodies do not even see the symptoms or have mild symptoms, they gather around at the parks, visit the elderly, go to the beach.

Sounds familiar? Therefore virus has the ability to spread itself faster and infect also the vulnerable people, such as the elderly and people with weakened immune system.

Let’s talk about group immunity. Everybody says that we will all have covid eventually. But actually group immunity says the other way around.

The idea behind group immunity is the fact that, it becomes harder or takes longer for the virus to find someone that is not immune to the disease. Before the virus can infect somebody else, the patient is already healed.

Let’s take an example of a group of 5 people. Grandmother, father and mother, boy and a girl.

Let’s say that currently the mother is sick, the father and grandmother are healthy (and never had the disease yet), the kids have already had covid with mild symptoms and they are healthy now.

The mother is in isolation, the father takes care of the kids and nobody visits the grandmother. In this group, the virus have no other chance to infect somebody else.

At the end, grandmother will be safe and the rest will be healthy. In the example, group immunity happened when 60% of the people had the disease.

Hope this clarifies a bit…

Stay home, stay safe, stay “virtually” together!

Hope you’ve learned something