But “where is the evidence that it’s protective?” asked Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. “We are still nowhere near back to normal in our daily behavior,” said Virginia Pitzer, a mathematical epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. But another group, led by the mathematician Gabriela Gomes of the University of Strathclyde in Britain, accounted for variations within a society in its model and found that Belgium, England, Portugal and Spain have herd immunity thresholds in the range of 10 to 20 percent. “At least in countries we applied it to, we could never get any signal that herd immunity thresholds are higher,” Dr. Gomes said. Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, said it wasn’t clear to him that Dr. Gomes’s model offered only one possible solution.

Source: New York Times August 17, 2020 09:00 UTC