Johns Hopkins doctor claims the US will achieve herd immunity by April

Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Marty Makary made a bold claim: “We will have herd immunity by April.”

Dr. Makary wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he estimates the U.S. will have herd immunity by then, due to the high but underestimated number of people who have already been infected and vaccinated.

“Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April, but suggested not to speak publicly about herd immunity as people may become complacent and not take precautionary measures or reject the vaccine “said Dr. Makary in his editorial published on Friday.

Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Marty Makary predicted in a Wall Street Journal that the US will achieve herd immunity by April

“But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.”

Dr. Makary found that new daily infections have decreased by 77 percent over the past six weeks (a DailyMail.com analysis of the Johns Hopkins data shows a 72 percent decrease), equating that decrease to a “miracle pill”.

President Joe Biden also said he hopes Americans can return to normal by the end of this year with a visit to a Pfizer vaccine factory in Michigan on Friday.

There were 74,676 new cases of coronavirus in the US on Friday, compared to six weeks ago when the seven-day moving average of new infections every day was 247,164. Infections have steadily declined over the past five weeks, but senior health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky have warned that progress is slow.

There are still more new infections per day in America than at the height of the summer summit, repeated Dr. Walensky on Friday – and even the current downward trend is threatened by the proliferation of new varieties like the one in the UK, which have already caused more than 1,600 infections in 43 states.

Dr. Makary’s rosy prediction largely rejects the presence of variants, noting that cases are declining in the UK, where the B117 variant quickly became dominant, triggering massive case swings and bans there.

He also claims that herd immunity has “slowed down the infection” in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where 76 percent of people are already infected. However, the Lancet report from which he drew these statistics documented the “resurgence of COVID-19 despite high” proportions of the population who had previously infected.

In the US, the CDC predicts that the B117 variant will be dominant by March. According to a recent study by the Scripps Research Institute, cases are already doubling about every 10 days – and experts are concerned that the 1.58 million daily doses of vaccine are not enough for the more infectious variants that are currently spreading in the United States.

Inevitably, with each passing day and every subsequent case of COVID-19, the US and every other nation are getting closer to herd immunity, and this is reducing the number of people susceptible to infection – but the nation is probably still a long way from reaching one Vaccination or previous infection for 70 percent of the population.

Vanderbilt University Professor of Infectious Diseases, Dr. William Shaffner said while herd immunity in the US is likely to rise and add to the lowercase letters, it’s too early to predict the nation will hit that point in the next two months.

“His thesis – I would raise it as a question, he would raise it as a conclusion,” said Dr. Shaffner.

‘He’s not just drawing a conclusion … he’s making a prediction.

Dr. Makary claims that between the number of people who had COVID-19 by April and those who were vaccinated, the U.S. will achieve herd immunity

“I really hope he’s right, but I can’t say that. I would prefer to promise too little and over-deliver. Keep talking about the end of summer or early fall to restore normalcy to the United States.

This is the consistent prediction of public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, since vaccines were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December.

Until then, Dr. Fauci and others that the percentage of Americans vaccinated will approach 70 percent.

To date, only 12.6 percent of the population has had one or more doses of coronavirus vaccine, and about 1.6 million doses are given daily. At this rate, Bloomberg’s vaccination calculator estimates that 70 percent of the US will not be vaccinated until around New Year 2022.

However, part of this gap is made up by the number of Americans who will gain immunity from surviving COVID-19.

As of Friday evening, 27.9 million cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed, according to Johns Hopkins University.

There is broad consensus that this number is underestimated. The CDC estimates that around 83.1 million Americans had the virus.

With a population of 331 million, this estimate would suggest that a quarter of the US population is infected and immune to COVD-19 (although it is not yet clear how long this protection will last, most studies suggest that he will last three to eight months at least of immunity).

Combined with the 12.6 percent of the US infected, that would bring the overall proportion of Americans with COVID-19 immunity to 37.6 percent. Even if both the CDC’s estimate of cases and the vaccination rate are underestimated, the nation is still a long way from herd immunity.

If both vaccinations and infections keep up with current rates, it is possible that the combination could increase the number of people with some immunity from one or the other to over 300,000 – but the falling case rates will that advancement and the variants – especially these – hinder that from Brazil and South Africa came to the USA and can avoid antibodies – could weaken the protection if they take effect.

Dr. Makary argues, however, that the number of Americans who have had coronavirus and are now immune, or at least at a lower risk of infection, is not counted in other public health experts’ predictions of when the US might reach herd immunity.

He also attributes this to the current and steep decline in new infections.

“Why is the number of cases falling much faster than experts predicted?” he asks.

‘In large part because natural immunity to previous infections is far more abundant than can be measured by testing.

“Tests only recorded 10 to 25 percent of infections, depending on when someone got the virus during the pandemic.

“Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean that about 55 percent of Americans have natural immunity.”

He writes that another 15 percent of Americans were vaccinated this week (data from Bloomberg estimates roughly 12.6 percent of the population received one or more doses of the vaccine), bringing the percentage of people with immunity to nearly 70 percent of the bottom Community protection.

It’s hard to say how many people actually had COVID-19, not just because the tests for COVID-19 and antibodies are inadequate, but because no nationally representative studies have been done on how many people have antibodies since November, said Dr . Shaffner.

Millions of infections have been documented since then. Hundreds of thousands are more likely to go undetected, increasing the number of Americans with immunity.

“By and large I think my colleagues and I would say that a major driver in reducing cases is actually increasing herd immunity due to the spread of wild viruses and varieties,” said Dr. Shaffner.