The World Health Organization advised public officials against trying to achieve so-called herd immunity to the coronavirus by allowing it to rapidly spread throughout their communities, saying it will overwhelm hospitals and kill a lot of people.
"Most scientists think 60% to 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated or have natural antibodies to achieve herd immunity," executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program Mike Ryan said. "Whatever that number is, we’re nowhere near close to it, which means this virus has a long way to burn in our communities before we ever reach that," he added.
Simply waiting for herd immunity to happen by allowing the virus to spread, as some opponents of social distancing measures have suggested, is dangerous, he added.
"The idea that we would have herd immunity as an objective, in some sense, it goes against controlling the disease because if you were to say, ‘We need to have a herd immunity of 70% and we should let the virus spread until we get to 70%,’ we’ve seen what happens," he said. "Hospitals get overwhelmed. A lot of people die," CNBC cited Ryan as saying.
