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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.
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.
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.
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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