How immune are we? Why answering this question is essential for post-pandemic life
The pandemic's formal end on May 11 marks neither victory nor peace: It's a cessation of hostilities with a dangerous virus that is still very much with us.
To maintain such an uneasy truce, Americans will have to stay protected enough to prevent humanity's viral foe from staging a break-out of our shaky accord.
Providing that assurance, in turn, assumes scientists and public health officials all agree on what it means to be "protected enough," and that they can tell whether people are meeting that mark.
On both counts, the nation's readiness to monitor this armistice falls short.
The trouble is no one has a clear fix on the extent of Americans' immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19. And beneath that lies a more fundamental problem: that scientists and public health officials still have not settled on what it means to be immune or adopted a common yardstick for measuring it.
"We're always at the point of having to make decisions without that data," , a Stanford infectious disease convened by the agency.
