Tag Archives: Amish Community

The Joys Of Herd Immunity

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Yesterday Townhall posted an article about the Amish community and the coronavirus. I recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article. It has a number of really good points. There is a lot of common sense in the Amish approach to the coronavirus that the rest of America and some of the American medical community has not yet discovered.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

Contrary to assurances that hospitals would be overwhelmed and bodies would be piled up in the street unless everyone locked down, masked up, and got a Covid vaccination, the Amish community – a technology-eschewing Christian group generally distrustful of government – actually managed through the pandemic just fine after a brief shutdown in early 2020.

“There’s no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight,” Attkisson (Sharyl Attkisson, an investigative reporter and host of “Full Measure”) said. “Some claim there were fewer here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or vaccines.”

The article notes that some of the Amish customs may have created herd immunity:

…When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and they take turns to drink out of that cup. So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup, if one person has coronavirus, the rest of church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.

The Amish had a remarkable attitude toward the coronavirus:

Even those who believed that they had Covid tended not to get tested. Their approach tended to be, “I’m sick. I know I’m sick. I don’t have to have someone else telling me I’m sick.” Or a concern that if they got a positive test, they would then be asked to really dramatically limit what they were doing in a way that might be uncomfortable for them. So, we don’t have that testing number.

…Yeah, all the Amish know we got herd immunity. Of course we got herd immunity! The whole church gets coronavirus. We know we got coronavirus. We think we’re smarter than everybody. We shouldn’t be bragging, but we think we did the right thing.

The article concludes:

‘Herd immunity.’ The medical establishment will tell you there’s no such thing, yet somehow it’s working for the Amish, who are now thriving while much of the rest of the world still languishes under Covid tyranny.

Maybe it’s time we stop thinking of the Amish as ‘backward.’

 

Great News–But It Was Not An Easy Trip

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Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail reported that the Amish community in New Holland Borough, Pennsylvania, has achieved herd immunity to the coronavirus.

The article reports:

The administrator of a medical center in the heart of the Amish community in New Holland Borough estimates as many as 90 per cent of Plain families have since had at least one family member infected, and that this religious enclave achieved what no other community in the country has: herd immunity. 

‘So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did,’ said Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite and administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that primarily serves the Plain community.

The article also notes:

By late April, when Pennsylvania was still under stay-at-home orders, the Plain community had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Infections quickly followed.

‘It was bad here in the spring; one patient right after another,’ said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial Medical Center.

Just how deep into the community the infections spread is impossible to know. Hoover speculated that among those displaying symptoms, fewer than 10% consented to be tested.

In late April and early May, when Hoover said the virus ran unimpeded through the Plain community, the county’s positivity rate — the percent of positive tests — exceeded 20%, its highest of the pandemic, according to Covid Act Now, a nonprofit that provides local disease data. (Last year, the World Health Organization recommended governments use a rate of 5% or lower for two weeks as the threshold for reopening.)

If Hoover’s assessment is accurate, and if more Plain patients had been tested, the positivity rate could very well have been higher.

While so few were tested, many exhibited all the symptoms that have become so emblematic of the disease.

Cooper estimated the medical center saw — on average — nearly a dozen infections a day, or roughly 15% of the patients it serves daily.

The disease, as has been true in the wider community, knew no boundaries. Hoover became infected in November; at least one of his children was infected twice.

‘It really went through pretty quick, in a few weeks,’ Cooper said.

The number of patients ebbed in the summer before picking up again in the fall, although not at nearly the rate as was seen in the spring.

Cases now are rare. Hoover said Tuesday that the center hasn’t had a patient present with COVID-19 symptoms in roughly six weeks.

Please note how reluctant the medical types in the article are to admit that this community might actually be done with the coronavirus. The article also fails to note how many people died from the coronavirus during the time it was going through the community.