VALLEY CITY, N.D. (NewsDakota.com) – The following is a news release by Dr. James B Buhr, MD, County Health Officer, City County Health District.

“One of the most frustrating and devastating things about the Covid-19 pandemic of the last 15 months, and there were plenty, was how little we knew about it when it started. We know quite a bit about other infections, which was useful with COVID-19.

The term “herd immunity” was spoken of almost immediately, in the hope that after enough people had the illness they would be immune, and when enough people are immune to an infection it can no longer spread widely, though there will almost always be isolated cases. The herd immunity for measles, for instance, occurs when 95% of the population are immune, and we achieve this now with measles vaccine, which has saved thousands of lives every year, because measles is devastating.

The number required for herd immunity to measles is so high because it is extremely infectious. A non-immune person only needs to be in a room where someone with measles has been in the previous hours and they will be almost certainly infected. The herd immunity number for polio is about 80% because it is not quite as infectious.

It has been estimated that the herd immunity number for Covid-19 is about 80%, which means Covid-19 should stop spreading when 80% of people are either vaccinated or had the infection. This assumes that previously infected people remain immune, something not yet known.

The other unknown is how much more infectious the “UK” strain of Covid-19 is. We do know that it is more infectious and therefore would have a higher herd immunity requirement. It is definitely recommended that anyone who has had Covid-19 get vaccinated.

So as experts have been saying, the only hope is a very enthusiastic response to the vaccine by all of us. We need the Covid-19 vaccine to reach 80% of herd immunity. Without the vaccine we could have up to five times the deaths we’ve already had.

On Wednesday April 7 came news that perhaps there is a measurable adverse side effect to the vaccine used in Europe (AstraZeneca). It is acknowledged as a possibility that the occurrence of clotting in the brain, called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, might be more likely to occur after the vaccine than would be expected otherwise. It occurred in 44 cases out of 9.2 million doses of vaccine, which might be higher than the amount that occurs naturally, though nowhere near as dangerous as getting the Covid-19 disease.

Some people feel nervous about having genetic material injected into them. Unfortunately, that is indeed what happens with every virus, including the common cold. The virus injects all its genetic material into our cells, and it uses our cellular machinery to duplicate itself, then reassembles itself into many new viruses which break out of the cell to infect new cells.

The nice thing about mRNA vaccines (which is what Covid-19 vaccine is), incidentally a technique under research for many years already, is that it uses just a piece of the virus. This vaccine couldn’t be made however until the gene sequence of the new Covid-19 virus was known, but fortunately that took only a few weeks. After that laboratories used the previous techniques to make a vaccine for Covid-19.

While a virus injects all of its genetic material into our cells, the vaccine uses just the genetic material from the spikes on the outside of the virus, which is not enough material to risk causing the infection, just enough to make our body recognize the spikes when it encounters them later, and destroys it, preventing Covid-19 infection.

Since not everyone will be willing to have the vaccine, if we don’t get 80%, we can hope that even some people getting the vaccine might at least slow down the spread, though we will still need to follow all the Covid-19 precautions (mask and social distance) until the spread is stopped.

It is in the interest of all of us who wish to live a “normal” life again to do two things:

-Encourage our friends and family to get the vaccine as soon as possible.
-Hope that even the poor countries of the world will get adequate doses of vaccine as soon as possible, so that we don’t have new more deadly variants spreading unnecessarily. We’re not safe until the rest of the world, including Brazil and South Africa, are safe.

To register for a Covid-19 vaccination go to www.citycountyhealth.org If you do not have a computer phone City County Health District at 845-8518.”

James B Buhr, MD, County Health Officer, City County Health District.