In the interest of curtailing – or at least reducing – disinformation from our national government about our ongoing U.S. pandemic, I’d like to point out some very basic math relative to any talk of U.S. herd immunity: To reach herd immunity, as many as 75 to 80 percent of the U.S. would need to contract the COVID virus. Every infected person either dies or recovers.
Currently, the U.S. has experienced over 8 million diagnosed COVID cases and over 220,000 reported deaths (per Worldometer). That is more than a 2.5 percent rate of death. To reach 80 percent herd immunity, over 265 million U.S. citizens would need to contract the virus. At a 2.5 percent death rate, we would experience over 6.6 million citizens dying in our country!
This is probably not a great strategy and suggests we might want to follow the advice of our Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention experts.
Lastly, we all owe our gratitude to Gov. Mills, Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC, and Maine’s other state and local officials for keeping us relatively safe. Their very tough and often unpopular choices have produced very good outcomes. These are hard times for all of us, but Maine ranks second best out of 50 states in controlling the spread of this virus.
Jerry Blodgett
Topsham
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