Ep. 140 Gabriela Gomes: Why Herd Immunity May Be at Hand

Our guest is Gabriela Gomes, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde. She specializes in population dynamics and the modeling of herd immunity and her recent work suggests COVID-19 herd immunity may be at hand. We discuss how herd immunity thresholds are estimated and why she thinks classic models are flawed and must incorporate a measure of variation in individual susceptibility.

GUEST:

Gabriela Gomes, PhD: Twitter and Website

LINKS:

• Gomes et al. (May 2020 paper): Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold in MedRxiv
• Aguas et al. (July 2020 paper): Herd immunity thresholds for SARS-CoV-2 estimated from unfolding epidemics in Medrxiv
• Britton et al. A mathematical model reveals the influence of population heterogeneity on herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in Science (Open Access)
• Kevin Hartnett. The Tricky Math of COVID-19 Herd Immunity in Quanta Magazine
• Fine et al. “Herd Immunity”: A Rough Guide in Clinical Infectious Disease (Open Access)

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