The role of COVID-19 vaccines may ultimately be more akin to that of the flu shot: reducing hospitalizations and deaths by mitigating the disease’s severity. The COVID-19 vaccines as a whole are excellent at preventing severe disease, and this level of protection so far seems to hold even against a new coronavirus variant found in South Africa that is causing reinfections. This, rather than herd immunity, is a more achievable goal for the vaccines. “My picture of the endgame is we will, as fast as we can, start taking people out of harm’s way” through vaccination, says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard. The virus still circulates, but fewer people die.
At the same time, we don’t need to hit the herd-immunity threshold before transmission begins to slow. With less transmission, fewer people will get exposed, and if those who do are vaccinated, even fewer will become seriously sick or die. The pandemic will slowly fade as hospitalizations and deaths inch down.
We likely won’t cross the threshold of herd immunity. We won’t have
zero COVID-19 in the U.S. And global eradication
is basically a pipe dream. But life with the coronavirus will look a lot more normal.
[...]
It’s helpful to think of the collective immunity in a community as a dampener rather than an on-off switch, too. Even if the herd-immunity threshold is not reached, every additional person vaccinated is a person who would generally be spreading less virus than if they were not vaccinated. A person exposed to less virus is also a person less likely to get sick, to go to the hospital, or to die.
In the analogy of the campfire, our current pandemic is a big, raging one. We might not have enough water to douse it completely, and we might not prevent future sparks from catching, but the water we do have will still help. The fire will burn slower and cooler. Every drop of water matters.