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An Amish community in Pennsylvania may have become the first group in the United States to gain collective immunity, says a local health official.
The administrator of a medical center in the heart of the borough of New Holland in Lancaster County, known for its Amish and Mennonite communities, estimates that as many as 90% of religious families have had at least one family member infected with the virus.
“So you would think if COVID were as contagious as they say it would pass like a tsunami; and it is, ”said Allen Hoover, an administrator of Parochial Medical Center, which serves the religious community and has 33,000 patients.
Amish and Mennonite groups initially complied with stay-at-home orders at the start of the pandemic – closing schools and canceling church services.
But by the end of April, they had resumed worship, where they shared holy communion cups and kisses, a church greeting among believers.
Soon after, the virus spread throughout the religious enclave.
“It was bad here in the spring; one patient after another, ”said Pam Cooper, medical assistant at Parochial Medical Center.
In late April and early May, the county’s positivity rate for COVID-19 tests exceeded 20%, according to the nonprofit Covid Act Now.
But Hoover said it was impossible to know the full extent of the virus outbreak, as he estimates that less than 10% of patients with symptoms have consented to be tested.
The medical center has seen an average of nearly a dozen infections per day, or about 15% of the patients it serves daily, Hoover said.
As infections have declined throughout the summer, before resuming in the fall, Hoover said new cases are now far and rare in between.
The center has not had a patient with symptoms of the virus for about six weeks, Hoover said.
But some experts are more skeptical that a large epidemic has led to widespread immunity in the community.
Eric Lofgren, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Washington State University, said herd immunity is possible but rare.
“It would be the first general population in the United States to do so,” Lofgren said.
Although experts have suggested that up to 90 percent of people would need to be infected to gain herd immunity, others said the exact threshold is still unclear.
“The key is that there isn’t necessarily a magic number,” said David Dowdy, professor in the epidemiology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Previous infections may also not be enough to protect against new variants of the virus, some experts have warned.
“The only real herd immunity we can provide as a community is for people to be vaccinated,” said Alice Yoder, executive director of community health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.
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