Attainment of Herd Immunity: Mathematical Modelling of Survival Rate

Abstract

We study the influence of the rate of the attainment of herd immunity (HI), in the absence of an approved vaccine, on the vulnerable population. We essentially ask the question: how hard the evolution towards the desired herd immunity could be on the life of the vulnerables? We employ mathematical modelling (chemical network theory) and cellular automata based computer simulations to study the human cost of an epidemic spread and an effective strategy to introduce HI. Implementation of different strategies to counter the spread of the disease requires a certain degree of quantitative understanding of the time dependence of the outcome. In this paper, our main objective is to gather understanding of the dependence of outcome on the rate of progress of HI. We generalize the celebrated SIR model (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) by compartmentalizing the susceptible population into two categories- (i) vulnerables and (ii) resilients, and study dynamical evolution of the disease progression. We achieve such a classification by employing different rates of recovery of vulnerables vis-a-vis resilients. We obtain the relative fatality of these two sub-categories as a function of the percentages of the vulnerable and resilient population, and the complex dependence on the rate of attainment of herd immunity. Our results quantify the adverse effects on the recovery rates of vulnerables in the course of attaining the herd immunity. We find the important result that a slower attainment of the HI is relatively less fatal. However, a slower progress towards HI could be complicated by many intervening factors.