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Notes -
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.
At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures. Even if avian flu does become a human pandemic and is widely acknowledged as such, it’s probably just going to have to rip through the population like any other transmittable disease. Those who get sick, get sick; those who die, die; and those who survive eventually reach herd immunity.
People in Medicine are really nervous, you are right that public health entities burned through basically all the credibility they had last time, but at current expectations this Avian flu would be be worse than COVID and U.S. healthcare (and likely everywhere else) has basically burned through every ounce of slack it had including things like people's willingness to work and mental health. A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.
Is the anxiety about the 1st few months? How much do the existing antivirals and the approved vaccine temper their perception of things? Sequiris has been groomed for a few years by ASPR to be in a position to rapidly scale up their manufacturing, and they already have (a very small) global distribution of it. BARDA is probably going to announce and grant them a treasure trove if there's actually a pandemic.
As demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, support for lockdowns/masks/precautions is very low, and even traditional supporters are going to be banging the economic drum.
This will likely kill much more young people before whatever crazy new technology we have gets approved and rolled out. At least thats the feeling.
I think it may be a bit doomer but the worse than COVID and COVID exhaustion bits are very real.
Ok, I understand where you're coming from now. I think if there's a pandemic it will be hellish for anyone working in healthcare. On the other hand Audenz was already approved by FDA and updating the formulation with antigens for new strains doesn't require new clinical trials to be reviewed by the agency before the supplemental formulation is approved. The rollout preparedness is (relatively) good already. They've just spun up manufacturing a 40 million dose stockpile of only the adjuvant from a $121 million BARDA grant, but that's mostly just to get Sequiris' manufacturing flywheel started. Probably 6 months until vulnerable populations start getting administered a vaccine from whenever a pandemic is declared, with a 1 month margin of error. So if the vaccine actually works that writes off the most apocalyptic outcomes.
I'm not concerned about the apocalypse, even without any further technology changes but I am concerned about stuff like people dying at their homes of heart attacks because ambulances are overstretched and we don't have the resources in the ED or hospital to handle otherwise treatable problems.
Like with COVD damage to the complex systems involved will take a long time to clear, if ever.
Not to mention medical professionals getting sick at a (much) higher rate than the general population, further decreasing the capacity. That already had an effect here in Finland during Covid.
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This still isn’t the Black Death 2.0. Literal worst case scenarios are still nowhere near what the virus was sold as.
Society didn't end and wasn't going to, but we did almost lose access to healthcare which is quite a bad outcome.
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