Waning protection, mutations will influence achieving herd immunity – Health Minister

As the coronavirus mutates to different strains and vaccine protection wanes a few months after immunisation, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony said there could be a challenge in achieving herd immunity.
Initially, authorities had described herd immunity as having 80 to 85 per cent of the population completely vaccinated with the COVID shots. However, the Health Minister advised in Tuesday’s briefing that other factors influence herd immunity.
This includes how the vaccine responds to different mutations of the virus, as well as waning immunity after a few months.
“Herd immunity is a tricky thing. It’s not just about how much vaccines you get. Herd immunity has to do with how effective these vaccines are going to work and for what duration. What we have learned over this period of time is that we can work to get people vaccinated and those numbers up into the 90s to 100 per cent. But after about five to six months, immunity starts to wane. What has been very difficult with this particular virus is apart from immunity, you have the virus mutating. That’s why you have different variants,” Dr Anthony noted.
Given these variables, he concluded that achieving herd immunity can be a difficult feat. However, those who are vaccinated would have significantly lower risks upon contraction of the infection as opposed to the unvaccinated.
“It is probably going to be very difficult to achieve herd immunity, based on the viral characteristics and of course, the difficulty in administering vaccines to everyone who should be protected. What is important is persons who are vaccinated would have a different clinical picture from people who are unvaccinated. If you get sick with the virus, your outcome is different.”
He added, “Those who are unvaccinated would have a bigger challenge because we’re seeing most of those people ending up in the hospital. In some cases, they recover. In other cases, they get a very severe form of infection, requiring ICU care. That has been challenging…We don’t see the same prevalence in vaccinated people.”
Dr Anthony is continuing calls for persons to get vaccinated and follow up with a booster shot to maintain immune protection. In fact, he emphasised that the country has enough vaccines in stock.
“We don’t have a shortage of vaccines. We have adequate vaccines right now. We have been getting our vaccines from different sources. We normally get vaccines from COVAX because Guyana is one of the COVAX AMC countries. We have also received vaccines bilaterally plus we went out and we also bought vaccines…More recently, we had a number of countries offering to donate vaccines to us but they had short expiry dates because we had adequate supplies.”

New cases
On Tuesday, Guyana recorded four new cases of COVID, contributing to 63,239 confirmed cases. The number of deaths remained at 1226.
There are three persons in the Intensive Care Unit, six in institutional isolation, 69 in home isolation and 16 in institutional quarantine. Some 61,934 persons have recovered while 566,380 tests have been processed.