As the number of Omicron cases rises, Israel’s senior health advisor believes the country could soon achieve Covid herd immunity.

Herd immunity is a scientific term that describes the stage at which a population is protected from a disease, either by vaccination or by people developing antibodies by getting the disease.

And if we achieve herd immunity by getting the diseases, Nachmann Ash predicted that the country will pay a price for this, and it should be achieved instead by vaccinations.

COVID studies have predicted that up to four million individuals might be affected by the end of January if the virus spreads quickly.

Naftali Bennett, the Prime Minister of Israel, has acknowledged that his current approach will not be able to prevent a significant increase in the number of infections.

On Sunday, he announced that a fourth Covid-19 shot would be provided to adults over the age of 60, as well as medical personnel.

The number of confirmed daily infections in Israel has quadrupled in 10 days to more than 3,500, but good news is that the number of deaths has not increased in the same way.

“The price of herd immunity is very many infections, and that may end up happening. The numbers need to be high to reach herd immunity, it’s something that is possible,” he said.

“But we don’t want to reach it by means of infections, we want it to happen as a result of many people vaccinating.”

And that’s true. if we “let this virus run through the country until everybody has had it, and we’ll have herd immunity’,” Retiring National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins told Fox News.

“The consequence of that would have been hundreds of thousands of additional deaths,” he added. “That didn’t make sense to me.”

And its “capab[ility] to shape-shift, it gets in the way of herd immunity.”

“We might have herd immunity to the original Wuhan virus but not to omicron,” he added.

“It’s like we have a new character here, a screwed-up sibling of what we started with, and our immune system has potential to fight it off, but it’s challenging. So the herd immunity concept assumes that you deal with the same virus all the way along. This has not turned out to behave that way.”

Israel’s Coronavirus taskforce chief Salman Zarka also highlighted that herd immunity was not guaranteed.

“We have to be very cautious with this particularly in light of our experience over the past two years in which we saw people who have recovered be re-infected,” Mr Zarka told the Ynet news website.

Meanwhile, Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute, another government adviser, warned that the number of cases would soon outpace Israel’s testing capability, leaving the country unable to detect new infections.

The number of people infected during the next three weeks is expected to range between two and four million, according to the expert, but a lower number of people will suffer from serious sickness than in the last wave.

People should get immunized, he stressed.

“Everyone who walks around, no matter where, will be exposed and should be protected,” he tweeted.

Approximately two-thirds of Israel’s population of more than nine million people have been fully vaccinated, which the health ministry defines as having received either a third shot or a second dose within the last six months.

Many of those who are eligible for a third dose, on the other hand, have not yet received one.

A fourth vaccine dose for immunocompromised patients and the elderly in nursing homes has already been approved by Israel.

Image Credit: Getty

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