Photo by Polina Tankilevitch / Pexels
Somewhere between scientists working overtime to make a vaccine or cure for coronavirus and countries going into total lockdowns to protect their populations, herd immunity has been brought up as a possible strategy in the battle against the novel virus. This controversial practice of letting a large percentage of the population get infected by coronavirus so that they can recover, develop antibodies and become resistant to it was floated around in countries like Sweden and the UK. While it has been implemented in Sweden where epidemiologists say it’s working, most other countries that considered it have dismissed it as too dangerous due to its high risk of causing death. However, researchers at Princeton University and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP)—a public health advocacy group based in New Delhi and Washington—are now saying that this questionable strategy could actually work in a country like India, which has a disproportionately young population that faces a significantly lesser chance of hospitalisation and death due to coronavirus.
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