Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, on Friday sent shockwaves through the medical community in a Wall Street Journal piece headlined, “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April.”
“There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection,” Makary writes. “As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
The spread of COVID-19 spiked after family gatherings over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they’ve been plunging ever since.
Why? “In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of
