ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Transmission dynamics reveal the impracticality of COVID-19 herd immunity strategies.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 106 citations in OpenAlex.
- Data-driven strategies for model-informed decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review.BMJ open · 2026Pooled it
- Maternal pertussis immunization and the blunting of routine vaccine effectiveness: a meta-analysis and modeling study.Nature communications · 2024Pooled it
- Hyper-exponential growth in an epidemic model: some explicit solutions and their significance.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Phase Boundaries and Critical Transitions in Coupled Epidemic-Behavioral Systems.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Strength and weakness of disease-induced herd immunity in networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Intersection of COVID Lockdown Policies and Parent Resources with Children's Media Exposure in Canada, the United States, Israel, Sweden, and New Zealand.Journal of children and media · 2025Article
- Structural inequalities exacerbate infection disparities.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The heterogeneity of aqueous solutions: the current situation in the context of experiment and theory.Frontiers in chemistry · 2024Review
- Relative role of community transmission and campus contagion in driving the spread of SARS-CoV-2: Lessons from Princeton University.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Predictors and motives for mask-wearing behavior and vaccination intention.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Global age-structured spatial modeling for emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Indirect Dispersion of SARS-CoV-2 Live-Attenuated Vaccine and Its Contribution to Herd Immunity.Vaccines · 2023Review
- How time-scale differences in asymptomatic and symptomatic transmission shape SARS-CoV-2 outbreak dynamics.Epidemics · 2023Article
- Optimal non-pharmaceutical pandemic response strategies depend critically on time horizons and costs.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The micro-economic effects of COVID-19 containment measures: A simple model and evidence from China.PloS one · 2023Article
- Learning delay dynamics for multivariate stochastic processes, with application to the prediction of the growth rate of COVID-19 cases in the United States.Journal of mathematical analysis and applications · 2022Article
- From Policy to Prediction: Forecasting COVID-19 Dynamics Under Imperfect Vaccination.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2022Article
- Disease-economy trade-offs under alternative epidemic control strategies.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Mathematical modeling of COVID-19 in British Columbia: An age-structured model with time-dependent contact rates.Epidemics · 2022Article
- The importance of the generation interval in investigating dynamics and control of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The rapid growth rate of COVID-19 continues to threaten to overwhelm healthcare systems in multiple countries. In response, severely affected countries have had to impose a range of public health strategies achieved via nonpharmaceutical interventions. Broadly, these strategies have fallen into two categories: 1) "mitigation," which aims to achieve herd immunity by allowing the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus to spread through the population while mitigating disease burden, and 2) "suppression," aiming to drastically reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates and halt endogenous transmission in the target population. Using an age-structured transmission model, parameterized to simulate SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the United Kingdom, we assessed the long-term prospects of success using both of these approaches. We simulated a range of different nonpharmaceutical intervention scenarios incorporating social distancing applied to differing age groups. Our modeling confirmed that suppression of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is possible with plausible levels of social distancing over a period of months, consistent with observed trends. Notably, our modeling did not support achieving herd immunity as a practical objective, requiring an unlikely balancing of multiple poorly defined forces. Specifically, we found that 1) social distancing must initially reduce the transmission rate to within a narrow range, 2) to compensate for susceptible depletion, the extent of social distancing must be adaptive over time in a precise yet unfeasible way, and 3) social distancing must be maintained for an extended period to ensure the healthcare system is not overwhelmed.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.