We’ve had cows, goats, dolphins all recently suffering outbreaks of this. The fact of the matter is that it has already figured out a way to jump to and spread among mammals in general, so going from other mammals to humans is likely only a matter of time.
And with the rate of spread and that fatality rate…yikes. You’re looking at an extinction level event right there.
If this turns into another pandemic, it’s going to make covid look like a mild cold by comparison. And if you thought lockdowns were bad with covid…
I laughed out loud when you said extinction level event. Come on now.
Trump said the same thing about covid. It’s no big deal. It’ll go away soon. Nobody’s going to die from it. Look at how well that turned out.
Bird flu in humans has a fatality rate of over 50% in humans. By comparison, Covid has a fatality rate of <3%.
Covid caused 2 million deaths in the US alone, with a fatality rate of <3%. What the hell do you think would happen with a disease that spreads just as easily if not more so and a fatality rate where half of the people who get it are going to die?
Not to mention that COVID damages the immune system and we’ve been letting it spread like wildfire opening the floodgates for another virus to come in and take advantage. H5N1 in a population with an already damaged immune system could be catastrophic.
I’m not. I’m done being scared after the pandemic, but we are careful now. My family continues to mask in indoor public places most of the time—especially if it’s crowded with a bunch of people we don’t know well who have small children. We had COVID over Christmas and New Year after going mask-free in the late fall. I ended up with COVID psychosis in February, and the health effects are still impacting me as a runner/triathlete up to this point in late April. Until more is done to remedy that crap, I prefer not to risk hurting my pulmonary or nervous system again. I’ve had friends who’ve had this thing about 3 or 4 times and dread to think what their brains and hearts are turning into—especially as they age further (we’re in our 40s/50s). I haven’t had a flu in ages so I suppose it works quite well for it, too.
The pandemic itself was not political, because a disease is not political. A fungus isn’t political. Bacteria isn’t political. None of it is political.
Just because a vaccine was approved using politics- doesn’t make it a political event.
Stop moving goalposts. This isn’t a political issue.
Since it first arose, H5N1 has been identified in a range of species including mink, dolphins, grizzly bears, foxes, and a polar bear.
It’s been especially devastating for marine mammals; in Argentina, bird flu killed 17,400 southern elephant seal pups, roughly 96 percent of all young born in 2023, researchers estimated.
Maybe I am missing something but assertion that the current public health risk is low seems to be based on more or less nothing. Why is the risk low? People are still working among animals some of whom are definitely infected, every day, in messy conditions. The consequences once it figures out how to spread person-to-person will be somewhere from moderate to apocalyptic, and what we're doing right now is clearly just half-measures to delay that happening by a little bit. Why is that low risk?
What matters more for public health risk is virility, and mortality tends to have a negative correlation with virility. In simpler terms, the more deadly it is the worse it is at spreading. It’s not a hard rule but is true more often than not, though I don’t know any details about avian flu. I assume if the CDC has determined the public health risk is low that it’s probably because it’s not particularly virile.
Do you mean transmissibility? I get what you mean, but I've never heard this word used this way. (Virulence is, more or less, the non-fatal version of mortality -- how much damage the disease does -- so not that.)
Be that as it may, once the disease is established in a new species it tends to get less harmful because of exactly what you're talking about -- but plenty of diseases through history have been in the short run both fast-spreading and deadly, especially right after they jump into a new population. Which is exactly what H5N1 is doing right now (on all three counts).
I am going to assume you don’t really understand what it would mean if there was a pandemic with a 10-50% case fatality rate in the modern global economy where it would be on every single continent on earth in a matter of days. I can assure you that housing prices would be the last fucking thing on your mind.
The risk is low because we have not yet detected a variant with the mutations needed to facilitate human to human spread. If we do it will jump from low to extreme very quickly.
"It is okay! The fire is only in the building next door along with the 10-15 others it spread to. Once we've detected it in our building, the risk won't be low anymore, of course."
(Edit: Actually, once it's spreading inside our building the risk won't be low -- we've already detected it in our building a couple of times, but it didn't spread so it's fine.)
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