Italy is far from herd immunity, says president of the Higher Institute of Health
Despite being one of the countries most affected by the new coronavirus pandemic, Italy is still far from achieving so-called herd immunity, that is, when the portion of the population immunized against a given pathogen is large enough to prevent it from continuing to spread.
In a hearing at the Parliament's Social Relations Committee, the president of the Instituto Superior da Saúde (ISS), Silvio Brusaferro, said this Thursday (7), without citing numbers, that the data “show that the percentage of immune people is still very low".
“Globally, we are far from the 70% needed for herd immunity. The objective is to contain the virus, we are not yet able to think about eradication, which will only be possible with the vaccine”, added the president of the ISS, the technical-scientific body of Italy's public health system.
The country has 214.457 cases of the new coronavirus, according to Civil Defense, which represents 0,35% of the population. There are studies that indicate that the real number of infections could be 10 times higher, but even so, this would mean only 3,5% of the total population of Italy.
The government has already launched a project to carry out serological tests (which look for antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 in the blood) to estimate the percentage of infected people in the population based on a sample of 150 people.
By Ansa Agency
