HOUSTON – Herd immunity in the nine-county Greater Houston region will be reached by mid-summer, the president and CEO of the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Paul Klotman, predicted Wednesday.
“The amount to reach herd immunity is a calculated amount” based on virus contagion, Klotman said. “It’s not made up.”
Herd immunity is defined as a high degree of protection from a certain infectious disease, like COVID-19, that occurs when enough of the population is immune which severely limits the spread of the virus.
That herd immunity for the original COVID-19 strain is 60% to 65%, Klotman said. With the new variants, it is closer to between 70% and 75%.
“That’s going to be … mid-July, mid-summer,” he said.
Those percentages include both those who are vaccinated and those who have contracted COVID-19 and recovered, he added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that for every counted case of the virus, there are several others that are uncounted.
In other words, Klotman said, we will have reached herd immunity in the region by mid-summer because about 50% of the population will be vaccinated by that time, and another large segment of the population will have recovered from the virus.
Klotman emphasized that contrary to popular belief, refusing to follow CDC guidelines would not delay herd immunity, but speed it up -- at an unacceptable cost.
“If we stop public health measures now, you can predict, we will have another 1,500 to 7,000 Texans die by July,” said Klotman.
Other health leaders who were part of the virtual news conference Wednesday, said the race is on to vaccinate people faster than the variants are spreading.
“We’re really concerned that we’re going to get a large surge from those people who are not continuing those public health measures, to really put a huge flow of infection and patients into our hospital,” said Bill McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center.
“We are in a much larger base of disease than we ever had back in June and July,” McKeon added. “We are not seeing the rapid decline that we would like to see.”
“The virus is the enemy,” Houston’s chief medical officer Dr. David Persse said. “Mask wearing is a strategy. A very effective strategy to minimize the effect of the virus.”