US Covid 19 Herd Immunity Map Released - For many, we are already there.
Corrales, New Mexico: Care Maps, Inc., today
announced the “CV 19 Herd Immunity Map” of the US, ranking the states according
to their vaccination and Herd immunity status. With no uniform national plan,
each state has forged its own path in managing vaccinations, mixing politics
and policy in different proportions. The
newly released Herd immunity mapping tool is now available to compare and
contrast performances.
The basis for the map is the discovery of an exact solution
to a 94 year-old epidemic model by a New Mexico scientist, Dr. Jacob
Kuriyan. This solution predicts the onset
of Herd immunity when just 25% of the population is immunized, through recovery
or vaccination or a combination. “The model equations were difficult to solve and since approximate
solutions were used, the relationship of Herd immunity onset to vaccinations remained
hidden and was unknown,” said Dr. Kuriyan.
Contrasted against this, the current estimates of the onset
of Herd immunity from the CDC and experts are between 70% and 85% immunization.
But with current national vaccination data, we see signs that the 25%
immunization is the correct threshold.
The results and map are available here:
There seems to be three types of states that
qualify to be past the threshold of Herd Immunity. New Mexico is the only state that has already
met the 25% vaccination limit. As
vaccinations increase, many more states will belong to this type. The majority of the other states have combined
their vaccinated population with those already recovered from Covid 19, to
reach the 25%. In the third type are Texas and Iowa that have
total immunizations less than 25% but with lower infections that stifled the growth
of the pandemic.
The onset of Herd immunity should be viewed as the start of
a journey – when the size of the epidemic begins to decrease - and not as a
destination when the pandemic ends. Many
states may have large pools of infected people remaining at the onset of Herd immunity;
without adequate safety measures, the pandemic can easily surge. “Infections progress geometrically, in leaps,
while recoveries move arithmetically, in small steps”, said Dr. Kuriyan. With visitors and new variants of the virus,
surges will inevitably continue, but the downward trend will improve with more
vaccinations.
The Herd Immunity Map offers an opportunity to rate the
performance of states in managing the pandemic quantitatively and to identify
the least risky destinations in a geographical region.
The paper with the details of the calculation has not been peer reviewed. It can be read here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.05.21251577v1
Physmark, Inc., a healthcare software company, used its patented
chronic population model to develop CareMaps.
Care Maps, Inc. has the exclusive rights to market CareMaps. Both companies are based in Corrales, New
Mexico. ◄
* This article was originally published here
No comments