Research suggests New York City may have reached coronavirus herd immunity threshold

Research suggests New York City may have reached coronavirus herd immunity threshold

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By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDJul 31 2020

A new study by researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Brookhaven National Laboratory and published on the preprint server medRxiv* in July 2020 discusses the effect of a factor called persistent contact heterogeneity on the final epidemic size of COVID-19. The researchers say that using estimates based on this measure reduces the herd immunity threshold (HIT) and suggests that the worst-affected areas, such as New York City (NYC), are almost at this threshold, meaning that they will not be sources of spread to other areas if a second wave of the current pandemic occurs.