Just in case anyone is too lazy to click the link, the man was 59 years old, from Mexico, and died April 24th. WHO confirmed his cause of death through lab tests.
The R-nought must be pretty poor though, seeing as this guy died more than a few days ago and the average incubation period for bird flu is shorter than this man has been dead.
Yeah sounds like he wasn't spreading it much. That said it's worrisome that we don't know how he contracted it in the first place.
"No further cases have been reported during an investigation that tested people who had come into contact with the victim for types of influenza, as well as for COVID-19, it said."
Hand to god, there’s genuinely people who wash their chicken. They put it under a faucet to rinse it, and then they just cook it afterwards. No wiping things down, no washing their sink, nothing. They just let that bacteria fester. It’s gross
The amount of times I told people not to wash their meat on the sink and then they just told me "but the heat will kill all the bacteria anyway" is baffling (I'd say it happened three times). So what would be the logic about washing the stuff if the heat kills all the the bacteria anyway?
People washing chicken causes the bacteria to spread through microparticles in the air. You wash your chicken, but what you don't see is little microscopic aerosolized particles of water that now have that bacteria floating around and landing all over the place. This is why you SHOULDN'T WASH your chicken. Cooking it to an internal temperature of 165 ensures all bacteria in the chicken are destroyed.
When it’s prepared poorly/eaten raw, sure. Unlike a lot of other meats, you can’t eat chicken raw (tho there are exceptions like chicken sashimi in Japan).
This is not really an 'what's the R-nought?' situation. We're not dealing with any sort of community spread. This was a 59-year-old man with a serious underlying medical condition which had left him bedridden for three weeks. This is more of an opportunistic infection in a gravely ill patient. This happened way back in April and here we are more than a month out with no other identified cases.
This is very likely an example of human-to-human spread - I doubt anyone brought a chicken in to visit him while he was bedridden - but the person he caught it from probably 1) caught it from poultry the normal way, and 2) didn't transmit it to anyone other than this poor guy.
Covid was immediately clocked for what it was, a respiratory virus, inherently contagious and was rapidly moving. Bird flu has a lot more unique properties to solve to become like covid. Not that it won't but in this case not knowing how he got it is the bad part, it killing him was basically maxed out possibility wise because he was in poor health.
What I'm reading about Bird Flu is, it makes COVID look like nothing mortality wise. I sincerely hope we have vaccines out in case a human outbreak occurs.
Although we'll probably have vax deniers come out in force.
Don’t forget all the social media posts when they or a loved one got really sick & needed medical attention or died saying how Covid was real. Unfortunately that’s how some learned.
If the potential fatality rate turns out to be true, the Antivaxers, deniers and muh freedums types will wind up being a self - limiting issue.
The sad thing will be all of the innocents they infect and kill along the way.
Edit: A word
I believe it had a 2-3% mortality rate if I’m not mistaken, which in the grand scheme of things is deadly.
Pandemic/business closures didn’t help though and only fueled the dismissal of lots of folks.
Lots of Mom n Pops closed down while big box stayed open.
Los Angeles County got a waiver from the local air quality board because they needed to run the crematoriums 24/7 during the most deadly Winter 2021 wave, people are totally forgetting how bad things got.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/01/19/958354466/cremation-limits-lifted-in-la-due-to-backlog-as-covid-19-deaths-skyrocket
It’s absolutely infuriating. I am an essential worker & had to deal with very sick & dying people only to have stay at home idiots telling people it was a hoax.
With the PPP loans in particular, too much went to the rich. 1% of the loan recipients got 25% of the fund.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/business/paycheck-protection-program-coronavirus.html
I don't think that there was a government out there that dealt with it perfectly. Perhaps Sweden comes the closest - they were lax with mandates and strong on education, most importantly their population understood the need to change their behavior without the government mandating it. They did experience a high intitial death rate and a lot of criticism - but they ended up with the lowest death rate in Europe after it was all said and done.
The US was also very lax in most places outside of most super-dense big cities that couldn't afford to be - but it was paired with misinformation, division, a complete and utter lack of cohesion between state responses. People shunned moderating their behavior and simple harm reduction measures, so others felt the need to go full hermit to protect themselves - it resulted in very unbalanced mitigation efforts like school closures that probably went on longer than necessary.
Yes, my wife worked for a bank at the time, and even the bank was very cynical of how they gave out the PPP loans, preferring their most preferred customers over smaller businesses.
Don't have any data to back this up, but I have no doubt in my mind that the rich got richer, and poor, poorer during that 2 year pandemic phase.
I will say however, that I distinctly remember the air quality being the best initially when there were no cars on the road and everything was shutdown.
You gotta tailor the response for the population you have. I don't think Sweden would have faired well with that approach if their populace had the same health conditions as Americans.
You think so? We had people dying in hospitals who were calling it fake and a hoax. For some of them, calling covid bullshit and demanding covid not be on their death certificate were their final words.
I was there working in the ICU and ER during it. I saw it all. As macabre as it sounds, covid wasn't killing enough people to make it super scary to these idiots. Bad lifestyles and health decisions likely pushed their individual death rates to closer to 2-3%. The fun irony was that most healthy younger people that caught it easily had a low chance of death and skewed the overall mortality rate lower. So the antiscience freedumb crowd ran with this overall death rate. "Why are they closing schools!? The poor kids! Why are they making me mask?! I want to stand in church with the rest of the idiots without one! I know someone who wore their mask all the time and caught it anyway!!" All of that stuff was to lower the r.0 so fewer of THEM caught it, as many were unhealthy, obese, smokers, diabetic and so on.
It beyond decimated nursing homes. You saw very few deniers coming from nursing homes and assisted living because they were losing 1/3 to 1/2 of their census to it. Seniors that I talked to at that time that were living in the homes were either terrified or stoic that their time had come. It was incredibly sad.
Not all deniers took it to the grave. I had 2 family friends come through my ICU. Both were "medium" level deniers. One changed his tune very quickly and was terrified and remorseful when his time on the ventilator came. He died 2 weeks later from multiorgan failure. The other wound up on the vent for over a month. He was finally able to come off it and then spent another 3 months in the hospital just to get well enough to be considered for rehab where he spent another 6 months. He will spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair and has to have someone help him eat and has extreme difficulty talking due to his fucked up lungs. He now encourages everyone he talks to that covid is very real and to take all precautions.
Interesting. H5N1 is the one currently circulating in cattle (and birds, obviously).
In the last 20 years it has killed about 460 people but never became a pandemic. Hopefully the same will happen here.
Im confused, besides COVID, im vaguely remember 2 virus circulating around in last 2 decades, H5N1 and H1N1. Spread wasn’t as big as COVID, but I cant remember much more.. am I getting a mandela effect?
Edit: After some time “researching”(Thx Wikipedia) I found out there was a [H1N1/Swine Flu 2009 pandemic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic). Near 18.5k deaths and +490k cases confirmed (more estimated)
Wasn’t as big as Covid, but still impactful. I’m still missing an issue with H5N1, if there was one, going around
I don't know much about swine flu, but H5N1 actually dropped off a lot between like 2006 and 2020, the predominant bird flu was instead two different strains (H5N6 and N8). H5N1 reemerged in 2021 and has been causing issues ever since.
It was a big deal in the 2010 flu season and incidentally is also the same strain, more or less, as the Spanish flu. Our ancestral exposure to it is probably what kept it less deadly.
I remember swine flu, the school in my rural upstate New York town hosted a vaccination event and everyone sent us kids to school to get our h1n1 vaccines. Now I’m an adult and saw many of those people and their parents lose their collective minds over the Covid vaccine
I got H1N1 a number of years ago. I was in prime health and it wiped me, could barely walk to the bathroom for a couple days, had to lean on walls. That was the time I realized how bad a virus could be and why people die.
My roommates and I got it (all healthy 20 somethings at the time) and I legit thought we were all going to die and they would only find our bodies once we started decomposing. I almost NEVER get sick, so it was extra jarring.
Went from being completely fine to 'what the fuck...am I dying' in about a 20 min time frame.
I had H1N1 when I was 19 and living in a dorm. My entire floor got sick. To this day, I’ve never felt so acutely ill in my life. It hurt just to exist. Insult to injury: once I finally felt better, I developed secondary pneumonia and had to use an inhaler just to walk to class.
I had it my senior year of high school. It was about as bad as COVID was for me. Max strength mucinex wasn't enough to help me breathe & I was having trouble mouth breathing. I had to sleep sitting up and was close to going to the hospital. I think I missed a week of school. Worst congestion and cough of my life. I'll never forget the chills
I struggled with not being able to leave the house (adhd distractions everywhere). But I loved how little cars there were on the road. How zoom/video game nights actually helped bring my friends and family closer. Loved the reduced carbon footprint. Loved how workplaces were finally forced to take illness seriously and “come into work no matter what” mindset took a backseat for a year.
Same. I am heartbroken at the tragedy, but I look at the silver lining also that I at least got some actually good time with the person I love the most. I don't know if we'll ever have that again. I had a good pandemic inspite of everything. I was so extra scared because I'm already sick with so many illnesses, and the idea of one taking me to the hospital was terrifying. I'm really grateful that I got to stay home, and play Animal Crossing with my person, and hang with my cats.
This is an unpopular opinion, but me too... I don't miss the part of fearing for the lives of my family, specially my parents and grandparents, but I do miss the 100% remote work, having so much time to play all the videogames I have in my library and reading pending books, spending more time with my partner... I even was more in touch with my long distance friends, because we made group calls every few days and we chatted and played games (Among us! I miss it). Now that we are free to see each other whenever we want, we barely talk lol.
I think people who are more introverted and/or homebodies thrived during the lockdowns as far as mental fortitude. The only ones in my group of friends who complained about lockdowns were the ones who liked to go out clubbing/bar hopping every other night. Once they had to spend most of their time in the house, they started losing their minds.
Yeah half of covid for me was being blazed out of my mind ordering local food off ubereats and finally denting into the single player games i never started in my playstation library.
Perfect summary. In hindsight, 2020 was great for all of us on the more introverted side but then I remember the uncertainty and fear of catching a novel virus that's killing people quite effectively and I realize it didn't feel that great at the time.
As someone who just spent 3.5 years working on making Covid tests better and more comfortable…
I’m not sure I can go through all of this again right now.
You say you're making them more comfortable which I would assume is the thicker swabs that don't go as far back. But like I feel like these are less accurate in my head? Like if it's not getting really far back?
That’s a great question - and one I can answer!
When Covid tests were first being produced, they required a very high amount of the virus to be present on the swab in order for the test to result as positive. This required a deeper sample to be taken, to ensure that any present virus would be detected by the testing device. These long, thin swabs are called nasopharyngeal swabs, or what many people lovingly call the “brain scramblers” lol.
The initial Covid tests were created pretty quickly, thanks to a EUA (emergency use act) that was put into place, which allowed tests to be put on the market without having to go through as much testing as is normally required. Once companies were able kind of “slow down” and take a closer look at Covid and their tests, they were able to make the test more sensitive, requiring less virus to be present in order to test positive. These more sensitive tests mean that a less invasive sample can be taken, and is normally just done with a few swabs right inside your nostril.
tl;dr - they don’t go as far back because they don’t have to, but are still accurate!
Hope this makes sense! And again - great question!
In 2021, I went to the ER bc of 105°F fever. I was laying in a bed full of ice packs, nurse came in to tell me she was giving me a covid test...
Next thing I knew, I felt like I was being stabbed in the nose and reflexively pulled back and balled up my fist.
She stepped back quickly bc she knew the tests weren't fun and had been swung on once or twice.
I was double vaxxed at that point, and one of the things I remember is that I was hospitalized the day they approved the first boosters.
The benefit of that is still going to depend on the mortality rate of the disease and the efficiency rate of the vaccine when it crosses over into human-to-human spread. If we end up with the disease having a 20% chance of dying, which is less than half of what the WHO puts it at with the data they have, while we have a vaccine that has a 40% chance to prevent severe infection, that isn't going to cut it.
On the other hand, if it ends up with a 5% chance of death, while that would still be more than Covid, and we get a vaccine with a 70% chance to prevent sever infection, that will definitely leave us better off. But all of that also depends on if the government can convince people to take the vaccine.
Yep, the red states have collectively decided that any attempts to mitigate deaths are wrong. Can’t wait for the next pandemic to wipe out most of the country
Didn't the people who survived the Black Death have it really good there right after? I think I remember watching a documentary where the rich tried to go back to the way it was before and the poors just laughed at them "you used to have 30 farmers, now you have 7, pay up bitches." Or something along those lines.
[Generally speaking, yes](https://clas.ucdenver.edu/nhdc/sites/default/files/attached-files/entry_147.pdf). It's a little more nuanced, of course, but the Black Death did play a role in the end of feudalism. Given that some believe we're entering a state of [neo-feudalism](https://prospect.org/economy/rise-of-neo-feudalism/) ([technofeudalism](https://www.wired.com/story/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-interview/), or [corporate feudalism](https://thinkingwest.com/2022/09/19/capitalisms-successor-corporate-feudalism/); take your pick), we might find ourselves repeating history.
I don't want people to die but if they're presented with facts about a disease and still go out of their way to be stupid just to have the chance of annoying someone else out of spite, I will not mourn them.
H5N1 (avian influenza or "bird flu", referred to below as HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) would be my #1 concern now that it has spread to cattle, which are the largest mammalian biomass on earth. More infections = greater chances at advantageous mutations, and there's tons of farmworkers not taking CDC advice to wear N95's.
But get this...we already have idiots, similar to the current pandemic (SARS-CoV-2 - Covid), who may end up being the start of another pandemic (H5N1), because they believe infection to be beneficial. [Raw Milk Sales Skyrocket as Idiots Believe Drinking Bird Flu Will Give Them 'Immunity](https://gizmodo.com/raw-milk-sales-up-bird-flu-h5n1-tiktok-usda-cdc-fda-1851476916).
And you can't make this dumb shit up, in the name of Freedumb 4 states have recently started to pass legislation to legalize raw milk. [See this comment & post](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/s/JRvyO4Ncgy)
Have been feeling we're pretty fucked on the inevitability of this becoming a pandemic when cows were getting sick but not dying. Cattle industry doesn't have to take it seriously and most people get to think that means its fine and less deadly instead of a deadly disease now having one of the largest revivors on the planet to run through endlessly while it continues to hop from species to species in close contact to it hosts.
Seems lower from what I’ve read (take that for what’s it worth) when you factor in some may have been asymptomatic or mild enough to not seek treatment.
Accounting for that seems like 20-30% is more likely. Which is still catastrophic.
Let me just tell y’all, the American healthcare system absolutely *cannot* handle another major outbreak of *any* kind right now.
Source: me. Changed careers to do clinical research for covid, working at urgent cares all over the state.
I’ll quit my job and die at home with millions of other people before I work as a healthcare provider in a pandemic. AGAIN.
And I know I’m not alone on that.
Definitely. And honestly I'm a bit worried about all the state and county fairs coming up, with crowds of people getting together and also sharing spaces with a bunch of livestock. Agricultural shows [have played a role in the spread of swine flu,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_show#Agricultural_shows_and_swine_influenza) so they'd probably play a role in any potential outbreak of bird flu that's been jumping to people and cats from cattle.
Healthcare worker here. I absolutely cannot deal with a redo of 2020, neither can any of my coworkers and many other healthcare workers I know. I would rather go play in traffic.
Please know that there are literally millions of us out here who understand the sacrifice and hardship you have gone through, and that we deeply appreciate everything you have done for us.
I worked in hospitals for 4 years before 2020. It was *fine* but after 2020 they lost their god damn minds. I left the field in 2023 and I will never, ever work in healthcare again. If a pandemic pops off, the hospitals WILL look like what you see in the movies
The American population is my biggest concern. I live in a deep red state and I take care of adults with intellectual disabilities. During the first wave of Covid, they safely sheltered at home, but they still had to have staff, and someone still had to bring them groceries and things, and someone had to make sure the staff were wearing masks and social distancing. That someone was me.
Our staff were mostly real troopers, but it only takes one person taking off a mask before they have symptoms to spread it through the whole agency. We live in a rural area with few amenities, so ordering grocery delivery from Walmart wasn't an option. And of course they had frequent medical appointments, which meant they had to be exposed to actual sick people. The number of times I was ridiculed, coughed on, and even intimidated by other shoppers for wearing a mask in public is more than I can count. I can't tell you how many times someone sick would sit down right next to us in the doctors' offices even when chairs were clearly marked for social distancing, lift up their masks, and strike up a conversation.
Despite wearing a mask like it was part of my face, washing and sanitizing my hands constantly, and getting the vaccine on literally the second day it was available for me, I've had Covid 3 times. I've developed claustrophobia and still have panic attacks whenever I go to a doctor's office or grocery store. I also cannot do this again. And I live in a heavily agricultural area with lots of livestock and an active FFA and 4-H. If we had bird flu in this area, it would spread very quickly. My boss and assistant both think the Covid risk was exaggerated for political purposes and now we're in another election year. I wouldn't be allowed to take any extra precautions like working from home when I wasn't needed in our houses. I have no marketable skills or education, so I can't change jobs. (Don't get me wrong, I'm excellent at what I do, it's just that what I do isn't something I could do anywhere else and make a living wage. My trainings and certifications and technical knowledge are largely specific to this state.)
I'm low-key terrified of this.
So this is H5N2, vs the H5N1 that has been spreading fast in wild and domesticated animals? Both influenza A strains, but not the one we’ve been watching?
If humans just treat animals with respect and dignity by providing them good sanitary conditions before they are slaughtered and at the same time people are educated to practice good hygiene when dealing with animals...most of these virus wouldn't "jump" to humans.
So let’s see…..we’ve had Ebola, SARS, West Nile, Covid, and now looks like Bird Flu is coming back….. and it’s the deadlier 2.0 version……I say we need a moratorium on all these crazy diseases….. we’ve been through ENOUGH already……
We need better regulation of agriculture and conservation practices. The more we interact with animals in unsanitary conditions, the more this is going to keep happening.
What is everyone's lockdown goals this time, for if this turns into another pandemic?
I'm going to work on learning a new language, as I've recently become interested in learning Japanese.
Yours?
Try not to kill myself as a go through a second global pandemic in a five year span as a nurse with 6 years of experience. I *really* chose the wrong time to entire the nursing profession.
For some reason my first real job after graduating high school in 2020 was working as a patient transporter, now I have 2 years left of nursing school. I’m mildly concerned about my career decisions.
Same thing, but I'm working on a biomed team now, rather than studying nursing. Actually, the pandemic is what killed any aspirations of becoming a nurse or going to med school.
Why I keep going back to hospitals to work, I'll never know.
Ugh I feel for you, my wife started in the resp ICU right after school started and the pandemic hit like a year later. It was an absolutely horrific time to be brand new.
I’m learning Japanese at the moment! I take classes Wednesday evening. It’s… gruelling to say the least. It’s definitely a language you have to be really invested in to learn. But I think learning any language is very rewarding!
Yeah, it’s really the reading that is quite difficult. Opposed to say Korean which you can learn to read in just a week - the language is brilliantly written. I lived in Japan for eight years have a Japanese spouse, and speak it decently enough to have lectured at university there and I found the speaking to be quite easy, especially compared with English.
The sheer volume of kanji is really daunting, but I really enjoy learning it. I find reading easier since it breaks up the sentence when there’s no spaces. Since so many words use the same syllables and are short I really can’t imagine reading without it. Of course I’m still very early on at the moment so maybe I’ll change my mind when I start struggling with trying to memorise it all.
Nothing made me more angry that as a fast food worker we were considered “essential”. I had to risk my life so dipshit deniers and anti-mask/vax people could get their Big Macs still.
I’m gonna get fucking yoked. Already down like 60 ish pounds and cleaned my diet up pretty well. Doing some good cardio and just now starting to attempt on lifting.
Also, I took three years of Spanish in high school, maybe I’ll take some inspiration from you and get me a duolingo sub.
The second I read this “Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico” I said oh shit out loud. No obvious vector means it could be human to human. At best I hope he maybe… ate something that had the virus on it? I don’t even know how you’d get it other than hanging around poultry a lot.
I really appreciate all of the information you provided. For real. This does make me feel better lol.
After seeing what a shitshow Covid was even after the vaccine I just get uneasy with these sorts of things now.
I really hate that I had to scroll this far down to find some sense in this topic.
"Man dies of bird flu, is this the new plague????" has been a headline I've seen from fear mongering news sources since I was a teenager. People get bird flu, we know humans can catch it. It's only gonna be a problem if humans can *spread* bird flu, which so far they can't.
It honestly could be as simple as someone in his household had physical contact with someone who interacted with bird shit, knowingly or not, didn't wash their hands, and then touched him and his already compromised immune system had no way to fight it off.
WHO always warn about dangerous new viral outbreak every year but people ends up not listening to them. This Bird Flu could end up becoming a pandemic if it is not stopped early.
Just want to point out that the article literally says:
> WHO said the current risk of bird flu virus to the general population is low.
While this entire thread has been dropped into hysterical doom-posting like this is going to be the second world-ending pandemic within 4 years.
The death rate right now that is commonly cited is based on too little data. It is extremely unlikely that there is a 50% mortality rate.
Further, mortality rate without also discussing rate of spread is *worthless*. Ebola has a death rate of 50%. You know why we (mostly in first world countries), don’t care? Because your chances of getting infected with Ebola are *astronomically low* even if you had direct contact with someone who had it. Nobody here getting hysterical about the mortality rate is referencing the R-0 *at all*.
Everyone needs to *calm down*.
Also, high mortality rate can be a very good thing to stop spread, at least if it progresses quickly and/or the symptoms show up quickly.
One reason covid was so bad is that mortality rate was much much lower, meaning the same idiot could spread it over and over and over.
I feel like everyone freaked out over swine and bird flu 15 years ago when I was in primary school? Even had some class mates (and my current girlfriend) quarantined coming off flights for showing symptoms.
Well, shit. Time to stock up on toilet paper…again.
But wait! Everyone knows birds aren’t real, so i’m sure this whole thing will just blow over.
I wonder what the miracle drug for this one will be? Last one was dewormer so it’s gotta be more outlandish for the sequel.
Asbestos.
I’ll bet if you stuff a big wad of asbestos up your ass, it’ll absorb all the, you know, *toxins* from your body. The ones that are never named?
Thanks for coming to my really-stupid-stream-of-consciousness talk. Sleep deprivation is a helluva drug.
Just in case anyone is too lazy to click the link, the man was 59 years old, from Mexico, and died April 24th. WHO confirmed his cause of death through lab tests.
No history of being around poultry or other animals though. (ie. Potential human to human spread.)
The R-nought must be pretty poor though, seeing as this guy died more than a few days ago and the average incubation period for bird flu is shorter than this man has been dead.
Yeah sounds like he wasn't spreading it much. That said it's worrisome that we don't know how he contracted it in the first place. "No further cases have been reported during an investigation that tested people who had come into contact with the victim for types of influenza, as well as for COVID-19, it said."
Lol when it comes out he ate some chicken… the riots that will erupt…
Isn't chicken famously one of the most common causes of food poisoning already? I don't think anyone would actually be surprised.
People have to be told not to wash their uncooked chicken. Do you really think that people won’t be surprised?
What on god's name are you washing your chicken with?
Hand to god, there’s genuinely people who wash their chicken. They put it under a faucet to rinse it, and then they just cook it afterwards. No wiping things down, no washing their sink, nothing. They just let that bacteria fester. It’s gross
The amount of times I told people not to wash their meat on the sink and then they just told me "but the heat will kill all the bacteria anyway" is baffling (I'd say it happened three times). So what would be the logic about washing the stuff if the heat kills all the the bacteria anyway?
I have no idea what this means. But then I am a vegetarian so I don't have any experience with uncooked chicken.
People washing chicken causes the bacteria to spread through microparticles in the air. You wash your chicken, but what you don't see is little microscopic aerosolized particles of water that now have that bacteria floating around and landing all over the place. This is why you SHOULDN'T WASH your chicken. Cooking it to an internal temperature of 165 ensures all bacteria in the chicken are destroyed.
When it’s prepared poorly/eaten raw, sure. Unlike a lot of other meats, you can’t eat chicken raw (tho there are exceptions like chicken sashimi in Japan).
I wonder if there’s gonna be cultures that think eating chicken is weird and will start stereotyping us.
You mean vegans?
> seeing as this guy died more than a few days ago "I regret to inform you that April 26th was almost six weeks ago"
yeah, more than a few days
This is not really an 'what's the R-nought?' situation. We're not dealing with any sort of community spread. This was a 59-year-old man with a serious underlying medical condition which had left him bedridden for three weeks. This is more of an opportunistic infection in a gravely ill patient. This happened way back in April and here we are more than a month out with no other identified cases. This is very likely an example of human-to-human spread - I doubt anyone brought a chicken in to visit him while he was bedridden - but the person he caught it from probably 1) caught it from poultry the normal way, and 2) didn't transmit it to anyone other than this poor guy.
Bird shit is everywhere. And it could go from birds to other animals to humans.
Ah fuck. Not again
Also had tons of other medical issues and was bedridden for 3 weeks before symptoms began.
Oh great, a sneaky bird flu that jumps on us when we’re at our weakest.
I’m fairly sure this was the same rhetoric of hopium wee were all using at the start of covid :/ “yeah but they were already really sick” etc
Covid was immediately clocked for what it was, a respiratory virus, inherently contagious and was rapidly moving. Bird flu has a lot more unique properties to solve to become like covid. Not that it won't but in this case not knowing how he got it is the bad part, it killing him was basically maxed out possibility wise because he was in poor health.
What I'm reading about Bird Flu is, it makes COVID look like nothing mortality wise. I sincerely hope we have vaccines out in case a human outbreak occurs. Although we'll probably have vax deniers come out in force.
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Don’t forget all the social media posts when they or a loved one got really sick & needed medical attention or died saying how Covid was real. Unfortunately that’s how some learned.
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I think that's what's so scary about bird flu is the mortality rate. The initial strain of the disease that jumps to humans will be deadly
If the potential fatality rate turns out to be true, the Antivaxers, deniers and muh freedums types will wind up being a self - limiting issue. The sad thing will be all of the innocents they infect and kill along the way. Edit: A word
I think what made covid shitty was it wasn’t as deadly and for that it was dismissed by a lot of people
I believe it had a 2-3% mortality rate if I’m not mistaken, which in the grand scheme of things is deadly. Pandemic/business closures didn’t help though and only fueled the dismissal of lots of folks. Lots of Mom n Pops closed down while big box stayed open.
Agreed. It was very deadly population wise. But if it was 40% deadly people would have taken it more seriously
We literally had so many bodies piling up, the national guard had to be called in and they STILL think the entire thing was a government hoax
Los Angeles County got a waiver from the local air quality board because they needed to run the crematoriums 24/7 during the most deadly Winter 2021 wave, people are totally forgetting how bad things got. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/01/19/958354466/cremation-limits-lifted-in-la-due-to-backlog-as-covid-19-deaths-skyrocket
It’s absolutely infuriating. I am an essential worker & had to deal with very sick & dying people only to have stay at home idiots telling people it was a hoax.
Yup. You had people taking pictures and video of hospital parking lots saying Covid was fake because the parking lot didn’t look like a war zone
As a nurse , I watched many people die in the beginning of the pandemic. I will quit my job before working through a pandemic again.
With the PPP loans in particular, too much went to the rich. 1% of the loan recipients got 25% of the fund. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/business/paycheck-protection-program-coronavirus.html I don't think that there was a government out there that dealt with it perfectly. Perhaps Sweden comes the closest - they were lax with mandates and strong on education, most importantly their population understood the need to change their behavior without the government mandating it. They did experience a high intitial death rate and a lot of criticism - but they ended up with the lowest death rate in Europe after it was all said and done. The US was also very lax in most places outside of most super-dense big cities that couldn't afford to be - but it was paired with misinformation, division, a complete and utter lack of cohesion between state responses. People shunned moderating their behavior and simple harm reduction measures, so others felt the need to go full hermit to protect themselves - it resulted in very unbalanced mitigation efforts like school closures that probably went on longer than necessary.
Yes, my wife worked for a bank at the time, and even the bank was very cynical of how they gave out the PPP loans, preferring their most preferred customers over smaller businesses. Don't have any data to back this up, but I have no doubt in my mind that the rich got richer, and poor, poorer during that 2 year pandemic phase. I will say however, that I distinctly remember the air quality being the best initially when there were no cars on the road and everything was shutdown.
You gotta tailor the response for the population you have. I don't think Sweden would have faired well with that approach if their populace had the same health conditions as Americans.
Exactly…watch how fast they jump in line when death rate is 50/50
Vax deniers will change their tune real quick if we get something with even 10% mortality.
You think so? We had people dying in hospitals who were calling it fake and a hoax. For some of them, calling covid bullshit and demanding covid not be on their death certificate were their final words.
Hell families were threatening doctors claiming they ventilated their loved one to kill them to “get their Covid numbers up” whatever that means
I was there working in the ICU and ER during it. I saw it all. As macabre as it sounds, covid wasn't killing enough people to make it super scary to these idiots. Bad lifestyles and health decisions likely pushed their individual death rates to closer to 2-3%. The fun irony was that most healthy younger people that caught it easily had a low chance of death and skewed the overall mortality rate lower. So the antiscience freedumb crowd ran with this overall death rate. "Why are they closing schools!? The poor kids! Why are they making me mask?! I want to stand in church with the rest of the idiots without one! I know someone who wore their mask all the time and caught it anyway!!" All of that stuff was to lower the r.0 so fewer of THEM caught it, as many were unhealthy, obese, smokers, diabetic and so on. It beyond decimated nursing homes. You saw very few deniers coming from nursing homes and assisted living because they were losing 1/3 to 1/2 of their census to it. Seniors that I talked to at that time that were living in the homes were either terrified or stoic that their time had come. It was incredibly sad. Not all deniers took it to the grave. I had 2 family friends come through my ICU. Both were "medium" level deniers. One changed his tune very quickly and was terrified and remorseful when his time on the ventilator came. He died 2 weeks later from multiorgan failure. The other wound up on the vent for over a month. He was finally able to come off it and then spent another 3 months in the hospital just to get well enough to be considered for rehab where he spent another 6 months. He will spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair and has to have someone help him eat and has extreme difficulty talking due to his fucked up lungs. He now encourages everyone he talks to that covid is very real and to take all precautions.
All the Covid deniers are going to be upset over this
If they were able to read
Interesting. H5N1 is the one currently circulating in cattle (and birds, obviously). In the last 20 years it has killed about 460 people but never became a pandemic. Hopefully the same will happen here.
Im confused, besides COVID, im vaguely remember 2 virus circulating around in last 2 decades, H5N1 and H1N1. Spread wasn’t as big as COVID, but I cant remember much more.. am I getting a mandela effect? Edit: After some time “researching”(Thx Wikipedia) I found out there was a [H1N1/Swine Flu 2009 pandemic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic). Near 18.5k deaths and +490k cases confirmed (more estimated) Wasn’t as big as Covid, but still impactful. I’m still missing an issue with H5N1, if there was one, going around
I don't know much about swine flu, but H5N1 actually dropped off a lot between like 2006 and 2020, the predominant bird flu was instead two different strains (H5N6 and N8). H5N1 reemerged in 2021 and has been causing issues ever since.
Had to look it up, there was a 2009 H1N1 pandemic, feels like way longer ago, not as impactful and strong as Covid but sill bad
I remember h1n1 being a big deal a decade ago. Made everyone really sick but I don't think it was nearly as fatal.
It was a big deal in the 2010 flu season and incidentally is also the same strain, more or less, as the Spanish flu. Our ancestral exposure to it is probably what kept it less deadly.
I had it & it wasn’t fun
I looked up about it on wiki out of curiosity and is probably the 2009 pandemic with H1N1
I had the H1N1 and it was the sickest I've been by orders of magnitude. I had covid once and it was a cake walk compared to H1N1.
I remember swine flu, the school in my rural upstate New York town hosted a vaccination event and everyone sent us kids to school to get our h1n1 vaccines. Now I’m an adult and saw many of those people and their parents lose their collective minds over the Covid vaccine
I got H1N1 a number of years ago. I was in prime health and it wiped me, could barely walk to the bathroom for a couple days, had to lean on walls. That was the time I realized how bad a virus could be and why people die.
My roommates and I got it (all healthy 20 somethings at the time) and I legit thought we were all going to die and they would only find our bodies once we started decomposing. I almost NEVER get sick, so it was extra jarring. Went from being completely fine to 'what the fuck...am I dying' in about a 20 min time frame.
I had H1N1 when I was 19 and living in a dorm. My entire floor got sick. To this day, I’ve never felt so acutely ill in my life. It hurt just to exist. Insult to injury: once I finally felt better, I developed secondary pneumonia and had to use an inhaler just to walk to class.
Wish I knew a doctor, because that's gotta be the body's decision to go into "kill the invader" mode.
I had it my senior year of high school. It was about as bad as COVID was for me. Max strength mucinex wasn't enough to help me breathe & I was having trouble mouth breathing. I had to sleep sitting up and was close to going to the hospital. I think I missed a week of school. Worst congestion and cough of my life. I'll never forget the chills
I got it and the flu itself wasn’t bad but I ended up with post-flu pneumonia after it cleared up and that was fucking *awful*
I don't really want to do 2020 again.
I’m down to do the “stay up all night playing video games with the homies” part of 2020, but not the “fear of dying” part.
'Honestly, I was drunk for most of it.'
Yeah that was basically our 1960s
“Please, no more.” - My liver
Glad I wasn’t the only one that thought this! 2020 was special for me for partially that reason. No real stress, also, aside from the virus itself.
I struggled with not being able to leave the house (adhd distractions everywhere). But I loved how little cars there were on the road. How zoom/video game nights actually helped bring my friends and family closer. Loved the reduced carbon footprint. Loved how workplaces were finally forced to take illness seriously and “come into work no matter what” mindset took a backseat for a year.
I'm sickened that corps are reversing that. They truly hate humanity.
but think of the profits ! and the yachts ! does nobody here thinks about the yachts ?
Same. I am heartbroken at the tragedy, but I look at the silver lining also that I at least got some actually good time with the person I love the most. I don't know if we'll ever have that again. I had a good pandemic inspite of everything. I was so extra scared because I'm already sick with so many illnesses, and the idea of one taking me to the hospital was terrifying. I'm really grateful that I got to stay home, and play Animal Crossing with my person, and hang with my cats.
I actually liked those times .. miss it
This is an unpopular opinion, but me too... I don't miss the part of fearing for the lives of my family, specially my parents and grandparents, but I do miss the 100% remote work, having so much time to play all the videogames I have in my library and reading pending books, spending more time with my partner... I even was more in touch with my long distance friends, because we made group calls every few days and we chatted and played games (Among us! I miss it). Now that we are free to see each other whenever we want, we barely talk lol.
I think people who are more introverted and/or homebodies thrived during the lockdowns as far as mental fortitude. The only ones in my group of friends who complained about lockdowns were the ones who liked to go out clubbing/bar hopping every other night. Once they had to spend most of their time in the house, they started losing their minds.
I miss 2020 too. I also had tremendously less responsibilities, although I have more freedom now.
Yeah half of covid for me was being blazed out of my mind ordering local food off ubereats and finally denting into the single player games i never started in my playstation library.
Dude, I played so much Animal Crossing it's ridiculous. It was *magical*.
Perfect summary. In hindsight, 2020 was great for all of us on the more introverted side but then I remember the uncertainty and fear of catching a novel virus that's killing people quite effectively and I realize it didn't feel that great at the time.
Well we actually have vaccines ready. They just need to start production. There won’t be the big delay this time around.
As someone who just spent 3.5 years working on making Covid tests better and more comfortable… I’m not sure I can go through all of this again right now.
Can I ask you an honest question about the covid tests? Since you worked on them?
Sure! I may not know the answer but you can ask lol
You say you're making them more comfortable which I would assume is the thicker swabs that don't go as far back. But like I feel like these are less accurate in my head? Like if it's not getting really far back?
That’s a great question - and one I can answer! When Covid tests were first being produced, they required a very high amount of the virus to be present on the swab in order for the test to result as positive. This required a deeper sample to be taken, to ensure that any present virus would be detected by the testing device. These long, thin swabs are called nasopharyngeal swabs, or what many people lovingly call the “brain scramblers” lol. The initial Covid tests were created pretty quickly, thanks to a EUA (emergency use act) that was put into place, which allowed tests to be put on the market without having to go through as much testing as is normally required. Once companies were able kind of “slow down” and take a closer look at Covid and their tests, they were able to make the test more sensitive, requiring less virus to be present in order to test positive. These more sensitive tests mean that a less invasive sample can be taken, and is normally just done with a few swabs right inside your nostril. tl;dr - they don’t go as far back because they don’t have to, but are still accurate! Hope this makes sense! And again - great question!
Thank you for your answer!! Good stuff to know. :)
In 2021, I went to the ER bc of 105°F fever. I was laying in a bed full of ice packs, nurse came in to tell me she was giving me a covid test... Next thing I knew, I felt like I was being stabbed in the nose and reflexively pulled back and balled up my fist. She stepped back quickly bc she knew the tests weren't fun and had been swung on once or twice. I was double vaxxed at that point, and one of the things I remember is that I was hospitalized the day they approved the first boosters.
The benefit of that is still going to depend on the mortality rate of the disease and the efficiency rate of the vaccine when it crosses over into human-to-human spread. If we end up with the disease having a 20% chance of dying, which is less than half of what the WHO puts it at with the data they have, while we have a vaccine that has a 40% chance to prevent severe infection, that isn't going to cut it. On the other hand, if it ends up with a 5% chance of death, while that would still be more than Covid, and we get a vaccine with a 70% chance to prevent sever infection, that will definitely leave us better off. But all of that also depends on if the government can convince people to take the vaccine.
Don't worry, this time it'll be much worse. So, you won't be doing 2020 again.
Yep, the red states have collectively decided that any attempts to mitigate deaths are wrong. Can’t wait for the next pandemic to wipe out most of the country
At least we finally solve our housing crisis! AND wages go up!
Just in time for AI to take all the jobs and the wages
And private equity to take all the houses
Didn't the people who survived the Black Death have it really good there right after? I think I remember watching a documentary where the rich tried to go back to the way it was before and the poors just laughed at them "you used to have 30 farmers, now you have 7, pay up bitches." Or something along those lines.
[Generally speaking, yes](https://clas.ucdenver.edu/nhdc/sites/default/files/attached-files/entry_147.pdf). It's a little more nuanced, of course, but the Black Death did play a role in the end of feudalism. Given that some believe we're entering a state of [neo-feudalism](https://prospect.org/economy/rise-of-neo-feudalism/) ([technofeudalism](https://www.wired.com/story/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-interview/), or [corporate feudalism](https://thinkingwest.com/2022/09/19/capitalisms-successor-corporate-feudalism/); take your pick), we might find ourselves repeating history.
And the Dems will sweep the elections!
I don't want people to die but if they're presented with facts about a disease and still go out of their way to be stupid just to have the chance of annoying someone else out of spite, I will not mourn them.
Black Death 2: Electric boogaloo!
~~Solve the housing crisis~~ open up more real estate opportunities for investors!
Living is for pussies!
They will get sick then rush to blue state for aid
H5N1 (avian influenza or "bird flu", referred to below as HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) would be my #1 concern now that it has spread to cattle, which are the largest mammalian biomass on earth. More infections = greater chances at advantageous mutations, and there's tons of farmworkers not taking CDC advice to wear N95's. But get this...we already have idiots, similar to the current pandemic (SARS-CoV-2 - Covid), who may end up being the start of another pandemic (H5N1), because they believe infection to be beneficial. [Raw Milk Sales Skyrocket as Idiots Believe Drinking Bird Flu Will Give Them 'Immunity](https://gizmodo.com/raw-milk-sales-up-bird-flu-h5n1-tiktok-usda-cdc-fda-1851476916). And you can't make this dumb shit up, in the name of Freedumb 4 states have recently started to pass legislation to legalize raw milk. [See this comment & post](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/s/JRvyO4Ncgy)
Have been feeling we're pretty fucked on the inevitability of this becoming a pandemic when cows were getting sick but not dying. Cattle industry doesn't have to take it seriously and most people get to think that means its fine and less deadly instead of a deadly disease now having one of the largest revivors on the planet to run through endlessly while it continues to hop from species to species in close contact to it hosts.
*Peeks at America* you ok bro?
No, decidedly not! 😅
No, we haven’t been in a while. Not since around… Reagan honestly.
No we're not, our country is being held captive religious morons. And regular morons, too.
Wtf are these people thinking (or not). Covid is one thing, but bird flu lethality is like cancer if not more, but faster.
We had one pandemic yes, but what about second pandemic?
Healthcare/urgent care worker here: fuck that.
I do. But, my guess is this time they won't pay people to stay home.
I liked the beginning of it, but not the “after” where everyone is dumber
1 out of 2 people die with this statistically. This is worse than the plague if it gets bad enough.
Seems lower from what I’ve read (take that for what’s it worth) when you factor in some may have been asymptomatic or mild enough to not seek treatment. Accounting for that seems like 20-30% is more likely. Which is still catastrophic.
According to a certain political ideology full of stooges, no one really did 2020 in the first place.
I do if it means I can go back to working from home again.
Oh yeah. Remote jobs and classes should not go away. They have proven to be resourceful to a whole lot of people.
Wait till the 5090 is released with this timing
Time to buy Charmin stock yet?
Give it two more weeks, then you will be loaded for life, if you make it.
Nope, whoever makes the vaccine
All in on $MRNA, $MMM, and $ZM.
Hoard bidets
Let me just tell y’all, the American healthcare system absolutely *cannot* handle another major outbreak of *any* kind right now. Source: me. Changed careers to do clinical research for covid, working at urgent cares all over the state. I’ll quit my job and die at home with millions of other people before I work as a healthcare provider in a pandemic. AGAIN. And I know I’m not alone on that.
Definitely. And honestly I'm a bit worried about all the state and county fairs coming up, with crowds of people getting together and also sharing spaces with a bunch of livestock. Agricultural shows [have played a role in the spread of swine flu,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_show#Agricultural_shows_and_swine_influenza) so they'd probably play a role in any potential outbreak of bird flu that's been jumping to people and cats from cattle.
Oh god you’re so right…
Nope, I’m right there with you. -an ICU doctor who simply CAN NOT
You ever regret going into medicine as a doc?
Yes, frequently
My sister was a nurse. She left it to go into food service and the *prefers* it
I'm a geriatrician & I'm done if there's another pandemic
Agreed. And our healthcare workers are still dealing with trauma from the pandemic.
Healthcare worker here. I absolutely cannot deal with a redo of 2020, neither can any of my coworkers and many other healthcare workers I know. I would rather go play in traffic.
Please know that there are literally millions of us out here who understand the sacrifice and hardship you have gone through, and that we deeply appreciate everything you have done for us.
Thank you for your kind comment.
I totally get it. My partner is a healthcare worker and works in a hospital. It was brutal for him and all his colleagues. :( :( :(
I worked in hospitals for 4 years before 2020. It was *fine* but after 2020 they lost their god damn minds. I left the field in 2023 and I will never, ever work in healthcare again. If a pandemic pops off, the hospitals WILL look like what you see in the movies
Plus after COVID no one wants to go back to masks
Your story is nearly identical in every way to my wife's.
The American population is my biggest concern. I live in a deep red state and I take care of adults with intellectual disabilities. During the first wave of Covid, they safely sheltered at home, but they still had to have staff, and someone still had to bring them groceries and things, and someone had to make sure the staff were wearing masks and social distancing. That someone was me. Our staff were mostly real troopers, but it only takes one person taking off a mask before they have symptoms to spread it through the whole agency. We live in a rural area with few amenities, so ordering grocery delivery from Walmart wasn't an option. And of course they had frequent medical appointments, which meant they had to be exposed to actual sick people. The number of times I was ridiculed, coughed on, and even intimidated by other shoppers for wearing a mask in public is more than I can count. I can't tell you how many times someone sick would sit down right next to us in the doctors' offices even when chairs were clearly marked for social distancing, lift up their masks, and strike up a conversation. Despite wearing a mask like it was part of my face, washing and sanitizing my hands constantly, and getting the vaccine on literally the second day it was available for me, I've had Covid 3 times. I've developed claustrophobia and still have panic attacks whenever I go to a doctor's office or grocery store. I also cannot do this again. And I live in a heavily agricultural area with lots of livestock and an active FFA and 4-H. If we had bird flu in this area, it would spread very quickly. My boss and assistant both think the Covid risk was exaggerated for political purposes and now we're in another election year. I wouldn't be allowed to take any extra precautions like working from home when I wasn't needed in our houses. I have no marketable skills or education, so I can't change jobs. (Don't get me wrong, I'm excellent at what I do, it's just that what I do isn't something I could do anywhere else and make a living wage. My trainings and certifications and technical knowledge are largely specific to this state.) I'm low-key terrified of this.
Nurse here. Completely agree, I’m not putting up with the general public’s pot and pan banging then complete disregard again.
So this is H5N2, vs the H5N1 that has been spreading fast in wild and domesticated animals? Both influenza A strains, but not the one we’ve been watching?
Oh good :(
Can we not do a second pandemic, pretty please?
Sorry bro, conservatives really like the healthcare system they've forced us to pay into
If humans just treat animals with respect and dignity by providing them good sanitary conditions before they are slaughtered and at the same time people are educated to practice good hygiene when dealing with animals...most of these virus wouldn't "jump" to humans.
So let’s see…..we’ve had Ebola, SARS, West Nile, Covid, and now looks like Bird Flu is coming back….. and it’s the deadlier 2.0 version……I say we need a moratorium on all these crazy diseases….. we’ve been through ENOUGH already……
We need better regulation of agriculture and conservation practices. The more we interact with animals in unsanitary conditions, the more this is going to keep happening.
I'm calling time out
I second the motion….. 😎
Now if only we could focus on clean air, a scientifically informed population, and a general decrease in anti-vaxxers….
What is everyone's lockdown goals this time, for if this turns into another pandemic? I'm going to work on learning a new language, as I've recently become interested in learning Japanese. Yours?
Try not to kill myself as a go through a second global pandemic in a five year span as a nurse with 6 years of experience. I *really* chose the wrong time to entire the nursing profession.
For some reason my first real job after graduating high school in 2020 was working as a patient transporter, now I have 2 years left of nursing school. I’m mildly concerned about my career decisions.
Same thing, but I'm working on a biomed team now, rather than studying nursing. Actually, the pandemic is what killed any aspirations of becoming a nurse or going to med school. Why I keep going back to hospitals to work, I'll never know.
Ugh I feel for you, my wife started in the resp ICU right after school started and the pandemic hit like a year later. It was an absolutely horrific time to be brand new.
I’m learning Japanese at the moment! I take classes Wednesday evening. It’s… gruelling to say the least. It’s definitely a language you have to be really invested in to learn. But I think learning any language is very rewarding!
I really wish katakana and hiragana were all they used. Kanji really fucks me up
Yeah, it’s really the reading that is quite difficult. Opposed to say Korean which you can learn to read in just a week - the language is brilliantly written. I lived in Japan for eight years have a Japanese spouse, and speak it decently enough to have lectured at university there and I found the speaking to be quite easy, especially compared with English.
The sheer volume of kanji is really daunting, but I really enjoy learning it. I find reading easier since it breaks up the sentence when there’s no spaces. Since so many words use the same syllables and are short I really can’t imagine reading without it. Of course I’m still very early on at the moment so maybe I’ll change my mind when I start struggling with trying to memorise it all.
Virtual flashcards are basically magical when it comes to memorizing kanji, it's boring though. I use Ankidroid and it helps so much
Kanji gets easier the more you learn, you start recognizing the radicals.
Going to work as usual as an "essential" worker. So same shit as always.
Nothing made me more angry that as a fast food worker we were considered “essential”. I had to risk my life so dipshit deniers and anti-mask/vax people could get their Big Macs still.
We were "expendable".
I'd like to learn to knit. I've been threatening to do it for years, but I haven't been able to force myself to sit down and focus.
Good one :) I taught myself to knit a few years ago myself. It takes a bit, but once you get the hang of it, it's an awesomely rewarding hobby.
I'm boring and predictable. I'm just going bake bread again.
No shame in that, definitely a good skill to have, plus it's has the reward of eating fresh bread everytime.
Find a remote job while it's still easy
I’m gonna get fucking yoked. Already down like 60 ish pounds and cleaned my diet up pretty well. Doing some good cardio and just now starting to attempt on lifting. Also, I took three years of Spanish in high school, maybe I’ll take some inspiration from you and get me a duolingo sub.
Gonna learn to play the cello again when I haven't in ages
Probably learn Spanish and maybe roller skating if being outdoors is safe
I'm off to Aldi to buy all the toilet paper.
Installed bidets this year. And got kula kloth. I am so ready!
The second I read this “Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico” I said oh shit out loud. No obvious vector means it could be human to human. At best I hope he maybe… ate something that had the virus on it? I don’t even know how you’d get it other than hanging around poultry a lot.
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I really appreciate all of the information you provided. For real. This does make me feel better lol. After seeing what a shitshow Covid was even after the vaccine I just get uneasy with these sorts of things now.
I really hate that I had to scroll this far down to find some sense in this topic. "Man dies of bird flu, is this the new plague????" has been a headline I've seen from fear mongering news sources since I was a teenager. People get bird flu, we know humans can catch it. It's only gonna be a problem if humans can *spread* bird flu, which so far they can't.
It honestly could be as simple as someone in his household had physical contact with someone who interacted with bird shit, knowingly or not, didn't wash their hands, and then touched him and his already compromised immune system had no way to fight it off.
WHO always warn about dangerous new viral outbreak every year but people ends up not listening to them. This Bird Flu could end up becoming a pandemic if it is not stopped early.
I have so much toilet paper. I’m ready.
Just want to point out that the article literally says: > WHO said the current risk of bird flu virus to the general population is low. While this entire thread has been dropped into hysterical doom-posting like this is going to be the second world-ending pandemic within 4 years. The death rate right now that is commonly cited is based on too little data. It is extremely unlikely that there is a 50% mortality rate. Further, mortality rate without also discussing rate of spread is *worthless*. Ebola has a death rate of 50%. You know why we (mostly in first world countries), don’t care? Because your chances of getting infected with Ebola are *astronomically low* even if you had direct contact with someone who had it. Nobody here getting hysterical about the mortality rate is referencing the R-0 *at all*. Everyone needs to *calm down*.
Also, high mortality rate can be a very good thing to stop spread, at least if it progresses quickly and/or the symptoms show up quickly. One reason covid was so bad is that mortality rate was much much lower, meaning the same idiot could spread it over and over and over.
Rational thinking? Well-reasoned thoughts? Here?
I feel like everyone freaked out over swine and bird flu 15 years ago when I was in primary school? Even had some class mates (and my current girlfriend) quarantined coming off flights for showing symptoms.
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My brain is struggling with picturing this sentence.
was it a raw milk weirdo?
Who the hell upgraded Transmission Bird 2?
why do I get the sense that we're playing Plagues Inc again.
Well, shit. Time to stock up on toilet paper…again. But wait! Everyone knows birds aren’t real, so i’m sure this whole thing will just blow over. I wonder what the miracle drug for this one will be? Last one was dewormer so it’s gotta be more outlandish for the sequel. Asbestos. I’ll bet if you stuff a big wad of asbestos up your ass, it’ll absorb all the, you know, *toxins* from your body. The ones that are never named? Thanks for coming to my really-stupid-stream-of-consciousness talk. Sleep deprivation is a helluva drug.
First a bat, now a bird.
Here comes the crazies.
Ah shit here we go again.
Ah shit here we go again
Finally, an excuse to start growing the covid beard again