This Wall Street Journal opinion piece, published on 18 February 2021, claimed in its headline that the U.S. will “have herd immunity by April”. Written by Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the article received more than 220,000 interactions and 37,000 shares on Facebook.
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The headline’s claim is built in large part on the assumption that “55% of Americans have natural immunity” to COVID-19 through prior infection. However, experts who reviewed the article told Health Feedback that this assumption wasn’t supported by the data.
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[Disease ecology expert Marm] Kilpatrick explained that the proportion of COVID-19 infections detected by testing is unknown, since there are no representative serosurveys available for the U.S. Serosurveys, or seroprevalence studies, measure the proportion of people who have antibodies to a pathogen.
Its claim that natural infection confers sufficient herd immunity to end the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S. also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, when we consider the example of Manaus. The city experienced a largely uncontrolled spread of COVID-19, which resulted in a high infection rate. Yet the city still saw a resurgence of COVID-19 that was worse than the first wave.
While the U.S. is indeed experiencing a fall in the number of new COVID-19 cases, scientists have urged Americans to avoid complacency.
