Barely 3 percent of Belgians immune to coronavirus: “That means that the infection is not so contagious”

Only three percent of the Belgian population is immune to the coronavirus. This means that they cannot get the disease again for the time being. This is evident from research by the University of Antwerp, which examined 3,600 samples.

Belgium is still far from so-called group immunity at three percent. Then 60 or 70% of the population must be immune. The samples were taken three weeks ago, but immunity is only visible two weeks after the infection. So this number says something about the contamination five weeks ago, just before the measures were taken.

“It shows that the virus has certainly not penetrated far into the population. And that a large part is still susceptible,” says epidemiologist Pierre Vandamme (UAntwerp) in De Oorning on Radio 1. However, this also says something about the infectivity of the virus. “3 percent is relatively low. So the infection isn’t that infectious.” This means that we can prevent a lot of infections with social distance. “It does show that it is a droplet infection. And that people have to be close together to pass it on.”

Vaccine

We are far from group immunity. We are still a long way from that. “We see that in other countries. So we will have to learn to live with such a virus for a long time. We will see group immunity swell very slowly. So we will have to wait for a vaccine that will cause this immunity artificially”, says Vandamme .

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