Amish community in Pennsylvania becomes first in US to achieve herd immunity after reopening churches led to 90% of households being infected with the virus last year

Amish community in Pennsylvania becomes first in US to achieve herd immunity after reopening churches led to 90% of households being infected with the virus last year

An Amish community in Pennsylvania has become ‘the first in the US to achieve herd immunity to COVID-19‘ after 90 per cent of their households became infected with the virus when they resumed church services late last spring. 

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.