Cayman Gov't resists Covid herd immunity label

The Caribbean country is reporting that 60 percent of its population of 65,000 have been fully (double dose) vaccinated against Covid-19, while a further 70 percent of its people have at least received a single shot of the vaccine. 

Such numbers mean majority of the population has been inoculated which would place the island nation at the top of the world list in terms percentage of population vaccinated against the highly contagious respiratory virus.

But the country’s Premier Wayne Panton was quoted in the Cayman Compass saying: “The advice is that there isn’t any specific number that is going to guarantee herd immunity… the truth is we haven’t actually set our minimum.”

Martyn Roper, governor of the Cayman Islands also told the media outlet that vaccinating 70 percent of the population didn’t represent a threshold of any significance.

“The scientists say that actually you can’t really establish a specific target for herd immunity. We don’t know whether it’s 70, 75, 80. I think the key thing is just to vaccinate as many people as possible. So, we should aim to vaccinate everybody if we can,” he said.

“I mean, obviously that will be difficult because there are some people who really don’t want to take it. I wouldn’t get hooked up just now on a specific target. It’s really just about trying to vaccinate as many people as possible.”

In the early stages of the pandemic the World Health Organisation (WHO) had intimated that herd immunity is a possibility when 70 percent of the global population or that of a country is fully vaccinated.

However, there are reports of some fully vaccinated individuals testing positive for the coronavirus, causing health experts leading the Covid-19 fight to be less certain about what percentage of a population needs to be vaccinated to attain herd immunity classification.