No herd immunity to Covid this year… This is basically what the World Health Organization announced this Monday January 11, 2021 even though vaccines are now available and vaccine campaigns started several days ago in many countries around the world. All in all, in the world, several dozens of millions of people have been given a dose of the vaccine. In France, 138,000 people have been vaccinated.
"We are not going to achieve any levels of population immunity or herd immunity in 2021," World Health Organization (WHO) chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said to a brief in Geneva. She added it was important to keep on complying with health guidelines given by the most hit countries, such as social distancing, facemask-wearing and using hand sanitizer to wash one’s hands.
Soumya Swaminathan also hailed the “incredible progress” made by the scientific communities to find a vaccine or a cure to stop the virus. But, “it takes time to scale the production of doses, not just in the millions, but here we are talking about in the billions” she said, before calling on people to “be a little bit patient”. The world then has to prepare to live with the pandemic for a while.
