Mitigation Multiplies

I hesitate to join the ranks of the abundant newly-minted amateur epidemiologists out there.  But here goes.

I’ve heard many people claim that a population can’t reach herd immunity to any disease until 60-70% of the population has been infected.   This is a grave overgeneralization; as this primer explains, the critical value for herd immunity directly depends on how contagious the disease is:

The critical value, or threshold, in a given population, is the point where the disease reaches an end...