India Should Unleash CO.VID-19 Into The Community To Achieve Herd Immunity, Scientists Suggest

When the world is racing against the clock to find vaccine and an effective treatment to CO.VID-19, herd immunity has been brought forward as the possible weapon against the deadly virus.

This strategy of letting a large enough number of people get infected and then wait for the survivors to develop antibodies has been a controversial subject in nations like the UK and Sweden.

So far, only Sweden is following this method and has had some initial positive reports of effectiveness. In some other countries, herd immunity has been shun due to the high risk of taking lives.

Controversial as it may seem, experts at the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, a public health group in Washington and New Delhi, and the Princeton University, claimed that this method may work better in nations like India, whose majority of population is young and may face less chance of developing severe symptoms when they are infected.

According to Indian epidemiologist Jayaprakash Muliyil, no nation can keep a long period of lockdown. He also said we could reach the herd immunity threshold before the pandemic affected the elderly.

He and his colleagues are confident a controlled unleash of the pandemic in India’s population will make 6 out of 10 Indians immune by November.

However, this study mentions no projections for the number of deaths and it is grounded on the hypothesis that as India has 93.5% of its population under 65, the virus will not cause so many deaths.

Another reason scientists cite to support their suggestion of herd immunity is that in countries like India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Indonesia, social distancing is challenging to implement as there are too many people living close to each other and the number of CO.VID-19 test kits is limited.

Experts at the CDDEP and Princeton University recommend the Indian government to lift its lockdown order, which has been extended to May 3, and let people under 65 years old to return to work as normal. However, measures like compulsory mask wearing and social distancing must be kept in effect.

This opening up of the community should be accompanied by a larger number of tests done and ramped up quarantine effort. Senior citizens over 65 years old must also be kept in isolation and should be the first to be tested and treated.

While the Indian government has not publicly announce the adoption of herd immunity, some critics said the limited number of tests conducted in India is pushing the whole country in this direction anyway.

India is also facing a severe consequence of lockdown, which is migrant workers stave and have no income to sustain their lives.

Muliyil said while deaths were inevitable, the number of lives taken by CO.VID-19 would be much lower than those caused by starvation and suicide as the economy took a big hit as a result of lockdown.

However, take the UK as an example. The Europe country did implement the same strategy but later abandoned it as the number of deaths were way too high to handle. That situation might mean a more severe consequence for India as the healthcare system in the country has already suffered with the current number of patients.

As air pollution might have an impact on how long people recover from the disease, herd immunity might not be a good idea in India where a large proportion of the community have a weaker immune system due to the polluted air.

So this comes down to choosing between citizens’ health and the economy. Plus, WHO has warned that we know too little about the Co.ro.na.vi.rus to risk people’s lives with herd immunity.

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