> The herd immunity threshold (HIT) defines the percentage of the population that needs to be immune to reverse epidemic 15 growth and prevent future waves. Figure 3 shows the expected downward trends in the HIT for SARS-CoV-2 as the coefficients of variation of the gamma distributed susceptibility or exposure are increased between 0 and 4 (to assess robustness to changing the type of distribution see Figure S22 for equivalent plots with lognormal distributions). While herd immunity is expected to require 60-70% of a homogeneous population to be immune given an R0 between 2.5 and 3, 20 these percentages drop to the range 10-20% for CVs between 2 and 4.
Curvefitting from COVID-19 incident waves, past SARS experiences, surveying of contact tracing data, pre-epidemic mobility data in the population, etc, all point to CVs around 3 which corresponds to a herd immunity threshold of 15% or so (hence the paper's 10-20% range). I think this is optimistic and a threshold of more like 30-35% is likely, which with durable aspects of behavior change might really end up being ~25%.