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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3296 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bird-flu-us-health-officials-h5n1-cdc-information/

This is concerning IMO. Avian flu slowly but surely gets closer to becoming a human pandemic. The CDC and other officals drag their heels and drip-feed information each Friday afternoon. Farmers are reluctant to test their animals. The authorities lack authority to enforce testing.

There has been a human hospital patient with bird flu in Missouri. Why is that interesting? Because he had not been in direct contact with likely animal sources. A household contact of the patient became sick but was not tested. Several of the healthcare workers who cared for the patient have become sick too. It's too soon to declare human to human transmission however. It may be the case that the healthcare workers got covid or something.

The problem as a whole is not taken nearly seriously enough. My only hope is that the vaccines for both animal and human use are developed quickly enough to prevent a pandemic, or to or mitigate it before it starts. It's a race against the clock and the officials don't seem motivated to run.

If the real fatality rate is sub-5% among young and healthy people, this kind of virus panic should be laughable.

5% is an enormous fatality rate. There's 140 million people under 25 in the country. If we assume they ~all get infected (as they did with covid) that's seven million dead. The real number would be way worse because of obesity.

Smallpox fatality rate was 3% and it was so bad that we literally drove it extinct in the wild.

I don’t know what to say, but that’s the threshold at which I might be willing to sacrifice another year+ of basic freedom in the communal interest. Anything less and, to paraphrase Boris Johnson, ‘let it rip’. Most people have 25-30 good years of adult life if they’re lucky (before the body starts noticeably deteriorating / ageing catches up to you). 4% of that is a lot.

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