Quote:
Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
The goal is to get enough people vaccinated during its effective time where the number of available hosts to the virus drops to zero (or nearly to zero). At that point the virus basically dies off. At worst it would stop proliferating. That’s simplistic but that’s the general idea (I’m not an epidemiologist).
In any case, really good news. I’m very happy to hear it’s coming from a US company (and most especially not a Chinese one!)
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That's the general idea. Here is an analogy:
You have a bunch of islands, with animals living on them. The islands are the hosts (us), and the animals are the virus.
The animals will die out on each island (either directly, or the island will vanish (host dies)). The trick for the virus "animals" is to disperse (spread) to a new island before the are extirpated on the existing island.
The ability to disperse to new islands is measured by R.
There are ways to prevent dispersal to new islands, such as masks, isolation, etc.
It is called the Theory of Island Biogeography and there is likely a wiki on it. Epidemiologists (of the stripe who study disease spread) learn and use this concept in their models.