IT WILL BECOME A NUISANCE.

As more people get vaccinated, the Wuhan coronavirus has a harder time getting from one susceptible person to another.

Eager to know when parts of America are finally approaching herd immunity against COVID-19? Then pay close attention to what’s happening in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Triggered by reopenings and fueled by the rise of more contagious variants, COVID numbers suddenly shot up across all four states last month. But then, just as suddenly, cases began to plummet right at the start of April — and they’re still plummeting today, even as restrictions are being lifted.

Don't you love the legacy press and its tendency to editorialize by pairing two events as if there is some causation?  The story came from Yahoo News, and the fauciism is strong in them.

“I do think this pattern is significant, and the leading factor is the combination of natural immunity from infection and vaccine-induced immunity,” says Yahoo News Medical Contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, a Brookings Institution health scholar and a primary care internist. “Between the two, you’re starting to cover the majority of the population in these states. We’re progressing toward herd immunity kind of by hook or crook.”

We may never actually know when a particular state (or the U.S. as a whole) crosses the herd immunity threshold, which experts describe as the point when 75 to 90 percent of a particular population is protected by antibodies. For one thing, true herd immunity — the goal of getting so many Americans vaccinated that COVID-19 can never spread again — is probably unattainable; vaccine demand is declining, hesitancy persists in certain pockets of the country, variants keep emerging and most of the rest of the world remains unshielded by prior infection or immunization.

But there’s another, more immediate way to look at what vaccination and natural immunity have the power to do, together: end the emergency of the U.S. pandemic, reduce COVID-19 to a manageable risk and let normal life resume even before 75 percent of a particular population has been fully dosed.

This isn't to say the virus has ceased to be a threat. “I do not think we are even close to real herd immunity,” Howard Forman, a professor of public health at Yale University, tells Yahoo News.

I wonder if Mr Forman is working from a model of homogeneous susceptibility.

Still, “the more people who are immune,” Forman explains, “the less steep the inclines.”

Patel agrees. “We’re not likely to get to ‘zero COVID,’” she says. “But it’s like a dimmer switch. When you have about 30 percent immunity, you start to see cases go down. At 50 percent, you start to see precipitous drops. And certain pockets of the country seem to be getting there first.”

Not only that, the asymptomatic infections that so had the boffins worried a year ago is now working in our favor. "[T]esting was scarce, so case counts — though also higher than anywhere else in the U.S. early on — could capture only a tiny fraction of the number of residents who got infected, survived and emerged with some degree of natural immunity. Then all four states experienced sizable winter surges, just like the rest of the U.S., expanding that existing base of protection."

But still, the fauciists have to scold and scare us.

It is the combination of these two kinds of immunity that could be at least starting to starve the coronavirus of vulnerable people to infect and depressing case counts across four of America’s previously hardest-hit states, even as they’ve continued to phase out official mitigation measures and combat more contagious variants.

It is long past time to laugh the scare-mongers to scorn. "[U]nlike previous declines, this one doesn’t seem to be happening because people are changing their behavior and taking more precautions. They’re taking fewer, yet cases continue to fall. Something else seems to be exerting downward pressure on the virus."  Which means that if infections continue to decrease, and the intensive care wards have reserve capacity, it is time to change behavior in favor of living free.