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As usual, you really came through, sending me to a host of links, studies and datasets which look at the interaction between rates of vaccination and impact on COVID spread. For now I’m going to mainly pass on to you what’s been shared with me. That makes more sense than waiting on me to digest and make sense of it all.
On the core question, Israel seems to have reached a tipping point when just under 60% of the total population had received at least one shot of the Pfizer vaccine. Case counts have continued to plummet since then, even in the face of aggressive reopening. If we combine vaccination-immunity with a substantial portion of the population having infection-acquired immunity, that could push the level of population immunity up toward or over 70%. That gets into the range epidemiologists consider necessary for herd immunity. Since that phrase has become so contested, perhaps it’s better to say simply that at that level Israel continues to see rapid declines in case loads even in the face of widespread reopening of normal social life/activity. Thursday was the first day in the country with zero COVID fatalities since June.