‘Gabriela Gomes studies chaos. Specifically, patterns in nonlinear dynamics... So with all its apparently chaotic eccentricities, the coronavirus was an ideal challenge for Gomes, a professor at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland... Based on data from several countries in Europe, she said, her results show a herd-immunity threshold much lower than that of other models. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” Gomes said. “It’s very striking.”
‘If that proves correct, it would be life-altering news. It wouldn’t mean that the virus is gone. But by Gomes’s estimates, if roughly one out of every five people in a given population is immune to the virus, that seems to be enough to slow its spread to a level where each infectious person is infecting an average of less than one other person. The number of infections would steadily decline...
There are two more arguments in the story, citing levels from 20 to 70 percent... The conclusion, as stated in the subhead: ‘The portion of the population that needs to get sick is not fixed. We can change it.’
Read here (The Atlantic, July 13, 2020)
