Great info about how herd immunity works and how important it is to consider how health choices that seem purely personal can affect others.
I’ve talked about vaccination and herd immunity on this blog before, but I think it’s important for me to emphasize how INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT it is to get vaccinated. The importance of vaccinating most of the population is usually explained using mathematics, because scientists study the spread of pathogens by using mathematics. But today, I’m going to try to explain it with cartoons and pictures, instead of math.
Without explaining the math, I’ll say that there are some “magic numbers” for vaccination. These numbers are unique to each pathogen/disease. For instance, for whooping cough, a disease that can make make babies very sick, the “magic number” is between 92 and 94. That is, 92-94% of people must be vaccinated in order to prevent disease epidemics of whooping cough. If that magic number – called the herd immunity threshold – is reached, babies are indirectly protected from whooping cough. If not…
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ImmYOUnology 