Pavlakis: Vaccinations in Greece are good but we need 80% to reach wall of immunity

US National Cancer Institute researcher, George Pavlakis, spoke about the course of the pandemic and the vaccination process in Greece.

As he told SKAI on Friday, referring to when we will build an immune wall, he commented that "it is too early to talk about protection at the population level, simply because we do not even have the numbers that will allow us to dream about it."

"We need more than 80% vaccinations, said the WHO, complete, for the entire population," Pavlakis explained, adding: "Vaccination rates in Greece are very good, but we want another three months or so."

"By the end of September, we will be talking about a wall of immunity," the researcher said.

The expert stressed that if Greece goes to 150,000 vaccinations a day, it will become the world champion of vaccinations.

China reportedly makes 20 million vaccinations a day, so we are talking about a proportion of 150,000 vaccinations in Greece.

Pavlakis noted that we must be careful in the summer because it will determine the autumn.

At the same time, he referred to the risk of an epidemic, ie the accumulation of two or more simultaneous or consecutive epidemics or disease clusters in populations.

This happened in South Africa where in some areas 25% of the adult population has AIDS and COVID-19 is highly contagious.

"A woman was infected for more than six months and made a huge range of virus strains in her body that took a long time to become in the population within a few months," he noted.

Greek health authorities announced 781 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours.

Two were identified at Greece’s borders.

The total number of cases is 413,170 (daily change + 0.2%), of which 51.2% are men.

A total of 41,854 COVID-19 tests were performed in the last 24 hours, of which 13,242 were molecular and the remaining 28,612 rapid.

There were 24 deaths.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a total of 12,370 deaths have been recorded.

95.2% had underlying disease and / or age 70 years and older.