Herd Mentality

The TeeVee was on in another room, with news on of course, and I heard one of the pundits describe 'herd immunity' as the result of survivors of Covid-19 passing on their immunity to others!!! How? All those who survive get an 'I' tattooed on their forehead, and go around giving ten-second tongue kisses to those not tattooed?? About the dumbest thing I've read/heard about the pandemic yet.

Well... there's always Boris.

Since he's dumb as a sack of hair, UK Boris Badenough asserted that 'herd immunity' would happen there, and why the UK government wasn't taking any steps to curtail the virus.

On Twitter, the former director of maternal, child, and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, Anthony Costello, wrote that researchers don't even yet know if people become immune to the novel coronavirus after catching it.

"Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?" he wrote.

Boris has since backed off the induced herd immunity schtick, which some of his 'advisers' say was never the policy. Right.

Based on vaccination experience, most folks (humble self included) assume that immunity lasts at least long enough to protect from the next exposure. Turns out, immunity varies

First, we don't know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19], lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.

What herd immunity really means is explained in the wiki.

Moo.