Israel may have achieved herd immunity against Covid-19

First jab

Israel has 56% of people fully vaccinated, Chile 22%, US 19%

UK is just 8%

> but everyone is apparently cool with that because "kids don't get sick from it"

The government and media don't give a stuff about anyone under the age of 50, certainly not under 40.

If kids don't get sick, then they don't get sick. What's foolish or difficult to understand about this? BTW when someone says "kids don't get sick from it" they don't talk in absolute terms. Kids also can get cancer, yet we are not screening their prostate yearly like we do with old men.

Wanting to harm children's future, education, development and mental health because out of your own fear is rather distasteful.

I agree with this part. My guess is that Israel is getting herd immunity at a lower overall immunization rate than expected because behavior is different too. There's still some amount of residual social distancing, social isolating, and so on. Plus whatever number of people didn't get a shot, but have some immunity from a previous (perhaps non-symptomatic) COVID infection.

If one reads the actual studies about "long COVID" (and not sensationalistic media reports that leave all the nuances out), they often emphasize that severity of post-COVID symptoms correlates quite neatly with severity of illness. Because younger people rarely have severe illness, that means the risk of long-term symptoms is very low for them. Not zero, of course, but low as with many other common illnesses for which major societal restrictions are not imposed.

People might be tempted to jump in with "But my friend who got COVID...!", but please don't, this is irresponsible in a scientific context. All those people before COVID who claimed to have chronic Lyme disease, doctors tell us, likely didn't, and long-COVID self-reporting and anecdotes is the same thing.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion based on the data at http://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Total cases have continued to decrease, with the most recent 7-day average showing a 30% decline, and latest figures showing 39 cases per 100,000 people per week. That's hardly "running rampant".

> people without health conditions under 50 have not yet had anything at all

This is not quite correct. There are a lot of people under 50 who've had the jab for other reasons. Frontline health and social care workers were among the first to get the vaccine.

The thinking was that some people within a community are interacting with many more people than others and that they would be more likely to have antibodies.

So the British government built a vaccination strategy around preventing death, hospitalisation and illness. It was estimated that if the vaccines had been available during the first wave and we had just vaccinated the priority groups we would have saved 90% of the lives lost to Covid.

Those over 20 are due to get their first dose by the end of July.

One important reason that school kids aren't being vaccinated is that the vaccines haven't been approved yet because trials in that age group are still ongoing.

But my impression is this decision has been too hard to defend, since it would necessarily mean more deaths in risk groups while the vaccination campaign is ongoing. And the difference in time to herd immunity is relatively small if vaccine access is good, only a quarter or two.

So yeah. The end goal is to eradicate the disease and to vaccinate everybody, but because of production and logistical problems that's not possible, so they focus on the in between goals of lowering death rate and hospitalizations, and that's been very effective so far.

1) they have herd immunity, or

2) the lockdown wasn't really doing anything anyway

Or both, of course. But the theory that accords best with prior knowledge, is that because they have gotten above 70% resistant (either through vaccination or the virus itself), they have herd immunity because that's what we expected.

The real news would be if they did NOT have herd immunity by now, as that would imply that vaccination is for some reason not working. But, good news, it appears to be working.

>"kids don't get sick from it"

..isn't strictly true. A quick look at the local (Danish) health department says that the hospitalisation rate of 0-9 year olds are 181 out of 17004 confirmed cases and 10-19 yo 180 out of 36065 confirmed. 23% of those had an underlying disease.

Hospitalisation is defined as someone who have been hospitalised for at least 12 hours with something covid related inside 14 days from a positive test result.

So while only something like 1% needs to go to hospital compared to 27% of the 70-79 age group they do get sick and so get long-term damage too.

It doesn’t mean nobody will get Covid and as you point out the immunity isn’t evenly distributed - so you could certainly have outbreaks in sub-populations.

But the overall trend should be downward.

But we'll be safe from scenarios like overwhelmed burial logistics in population centers so there won't be much pressure for action. Which personally I find a bit unfortunate, because with vaccinating going forward an additional month more of countermeasures has a well-defined benefit whereas earlier in the pandemic the benefit was a bit murky because countermeasures might have been just a delay of eventually inevitable infections. Cost/benefit is much better now, but cost of inaction is ceasing to be sensational failure, it's getting subtle now.

Lucky I think are countries like Portugal that have tackled a massive wave just before vaccination ramp-up, I believe that they can just watch as the infection rates recovering from hard suppression slowly creep up before vaccination eventually takes their sting, with little risk of another wave hitting unbearable levels.

Yes. It's been one of the dumbest narratives of the last year that "herd immunity" is a single, fixed constant determined solely by vaccination rate. It isn't. The threshold itself is going to differ by subpopulation, and is affected by population mixing, mobility, climate, age distribution, current disease prevalence, natural infection rate and lots of other factors. For example, it's quite possible that large pockets of rural areas will achieve "herd immunity" long before, say, London, simply because there are fewer people interacting on a daily basis.

Even then, it's not like you hit the threshold, and infections just drop off dramatically. It's a shift as you get closer to the "threshold" (whatever that actually is), with infections gradually falling toward (but likely never reaching) zero.

This toy model version of herd immunity is appealing to the Thomas Pueyos of the world, but not at all representative of what happens in messy reality.

I believe in my borough that 60-70% figure is actually closer to 70-80% by now. Unfortunately Greater Manchester is really a very large system, and a lot of other boroughs have not been as efficient.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-vaccin...

I have what I think is interesting anecdotal data regarding restaurant works. 1st I live in Miami Beach where it’s essentially been spring break for over a month.

Ocean drive has been blocked off since pretty early on in the shutdown with the city giving the restaurants pretty large swaths of the street for outdoor seating. These have restaurants have pretty much been at full capacity since the election if not a little before.

Even though they have been operating what would be full capacity meaning fully staffed, I noticed in the last week many of them now have hiring signs that all read “for all positions”. In my mind this can only mean these fully staffed and operational restaurants must have had larger outbreak amount staff recently. While I don’t know if it’s true, I’m left thinking that mass outbreaks is exactly what happened, meaning once a give restaurant staff is infected the restaurants are simply replacing them with new staff which will subject these new batches of employees to a mass outbreak and some point. It it turns out to be true, it’s essentially the people forced into these temporary jobs where they will inevitably get corona just to be discarded and rinse/repeat all because people need income they will willingly subject themselves to that kind of environment...it really feels like im watching a dystopia of the haves and have nots, and while it’s always been the case to a degree, the scale and stakes are deeply disturbing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Theoretical_basi...

But, it depends on a lot of real world factors:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4

In particular treating R0 as a constant in the basic herd immunity equation is a huge leap to make.

There's a lot going on right now and I'm suspicious of any ad-hoc math given there are so many variables at play.

b) despite "a", vaccinating some of them

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Edit: last side effects report. If you can read it... https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...

Whether that's just or fair or good policy, certainly up for debate.

Change it too much and the vaccine doesn’t work, but neither does the virus.

It is true. Wonder if vaccine is the only way against COVID?

We can't assume this for sure.

And the trendline on the polling is that the % willing to get vaccinated is slowly climbing since the vaccine development successes were announced last fall.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/342431/satisfaction-vaccine-rol...

I think we'll get there.

Other than that: Germany was in advanced talks with multiple suppliers way earlier than most EU countries in Summer 2020, was able to spend more and even got offered priority supply from Biontech (which only supplies Germany and Turkey directly, all other countries are supplied through Pfizer). Chancellor Merkel specifically ordered these talks and procurement efforts to be stopped, so that in solidarity with other EU countries procurement would be centralized by the EU (which then did everything wrong without politicians, also German politicians, intervening).

In hindsight it would've been way faster, cheaper and easier had Germany just procured enough vaccine for the whole EU on its own. The additional contract you mention was closed after the end of EU talks (not a few weeks after it started),is in no direct competition (as it will be delivered afterwards) and will he shared with other countries anyway.

If you look at it from another angle: There is no other country in the world, where one of the best vaccines has been developed and is produced in vast quantities and that has been offered priority supply for the whole population, but declined that and exports way more vaccine than it is using itself. All while the economy is on shutdown and people are dying.

I agree that (german) politicians did almost everything wrong in this crisis - but to accuse them of egoism is the last thing that would come to my mind.

The reproduction rate is either higher than 1 or lower than 1. In any population, if the reproduction rate is lower than 1 the virus will be in decline BY DEFINITION.

Now, some subpopulations might see reproduction factor higher than one but that is still not nullifying the previous statement.

For example, the world might reach heard immunity even if Afghanistan and Russia are still seeing increase in cases.

When they say "Israel" reached herd immunity they mean that, overall, the number of cases in Israel is falling. That's basically what it means.

Additional assumption about "herd immunity" is that this decline will continue even if extraordinary restrictions are lifted, which means that the reproduction factor is low enough on basis of peoples' acquired immunity to be under 1.0000 even without restrictions.