Gabriela Gomes: Why Herd Immunity May Be at Hand
Our guest is Gabriela Gomes, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde. She specializes in population dynamics and the modeling of herd immunity and her recent work suggests covid-19 herd immunity may be at hand. We discuss how herd immunity thresholds are estimated and why she thinks classic models are flawed and must incorporate a measure of variation in individual susceptibility.
SHOW NOTES
Gomes et al. (May 2020 paper), ”Individual Variation in Susceptibility or Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 Lowers the Herd Immunity Threshold” in MedRxiv
Aguas et al. (July 2020 paper), ”Herd Immunity Thresholds for SARS-CoV-2 Estimated from Unfolding Epidemics” in Medrxiv
Britton et al., ”A Mathematical Model Reveals the Influence of Population Heterogeneity on Herd Immunity to SARS-CoV-2” in Science (open access)
Kevin Hartnett, ”The Tricky Math of COVID-19 Herd Immunity” in Quanta Magazine
Fine et al., “’Herd Immunity’: A Rough Guide” in Clinical Infectious Disease (open access)
Watch the episode on YouTube
