Amish community may have reached coronavirus ‘herd immunity,’ health official says

 An Amish community in Pennsylvania may become the primary group within the U.S. to realize herd immunity, an area health official claims.

The administrator of a center within the heart of Lancaster County’s New Holland Borough, which is understood for its Amish and Mennonite communities, estimates that as many as 90 percent of the religious families have had a minimum of one loved one infected with the virus.


"So, you'd think if COVID was as contagious as they assert, it might undergo sort of a tsunami; and it did," said Allen Hoover, an administrator of the Parochial center, which caters to the religious community and has 33,000 patients.

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The Amish and Mennonite groups initially complied with stay-at-home orders at the start of the pandemic — shuttering schoolhouses and canceling church services.

But by late April, that they had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Soon after, the virus tore throughout the religious enclave.

"It was bad here within the spring; one patient right after another," said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial center.

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In late April and early May, the county’s positivity rate for COVID-19 tests exceeded 20 percent, consistent with the nonprofit Covid Act Now.

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But Hoover said that it’s impossible to understand the complete extent of the virus outbreak since he estimates that fewer than 10 percent of patients displaying symptoms consented to be tested.

The center saw on average nearly a dozen infections each day, or around 15 percent of the patients it serves daily, Hoover said.

While infections ebbed through the summer, before learning again within the fall, Hoover said new cases are now far and few in between.

The center hasn’t had a patient present with virus symptoms in roughly six weeks, Hoover said.

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But some experts are more skeptical that an outsized outbreak has led to widespread immunity within the community.

Eric Lofgren, an communicable disease epidemiologist at Washington State University, said herd immunity is feasible but rare.

"It would be the primary general population within us that’s done it," Lofgren said.

Though experts have suggested that as many as 90 percent of individuals would wish to be infected to realize herd immunity, others said the precise threshold remains unclear.

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"The key's that there's not necessarily an atomic number," said David Dowdy, a professor within the epidemiology department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Previous infections also won't be enough to guard against new variants of the virus, some experts have warned.

"The only true herd immunity that we will bring as a community is for people to be vaccinated," said Alice Yoder, executive of Community Health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.

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