There is no “magic number” when it comes to the level of the population which needs to be vaccinated before mass lockdowns end, according to Victorian Deputy Chief Health Officer Professor Allen Cheng.
“We vaccinate for two reasons; one is the direct protection that the person gets from getting seriously unwell, and then there's the indirect protection about passing it on,” he said. “The reason why there's not one single magic number is that it depends on who it is.
” The deputy chief health officer said elderly people in nursing homes did not contribute much to herd immunity but younger people who have “many more interactions tend to”. “When you get up to much higher coverage rates then it makes a whole lot of things easier,” he said. "We may not need the intensity of restrictions, or we may be able to only do contact tracing without having to do other things quite to the same level and that's the benefit of vaccination.
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