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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

This strain has a 60-70% mortality rate in humans in known cases. Spread in mammals would be a bit concerning.

> Due to the high lethality and virulence of HPAI A(H5N1), its endemic presence, its increasingly large host reservoir, and its significant ongoing mutations, in 2006, the H5N1 virus has been regarded to be the world's largest pandemic threat, and billions of dollars are being spent researching H5N1 and preparing for a potential influenza pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

(Complicated a bit by unknown prevalence of mild cases, but it’s not a nothing burger.)

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You can count the total number of confirmed human cases of H5N1 in the US, Canada, and the EU combined on one hand. That mortality rate is so skewed as to be useless.

“When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (Trump, Feb 2020)

As I said, it’s certainly complicated by not knowing how many mild cases are out there undetected, but that doesn’t make it unconcerning.

Nearly everyone who died from COVID had multiple comorbidities. Biggest nothingburger of this century.

Yes the millions of deaths were a nothingburger. You showed them!

Still behind cancer and heart disease.

More people are cheeseburgering themselves to death in this country.

I've had multiple friends and family die from this so-called nothing burger. My mother's heath will never be the same, she is now consigned to a wheelchair. Your statement is inflammatory and unhelpful, it does not advance the conversation, and is a provable falsehood.

Tell me about your mom's PD/CVD/Diabetes pre-COVID.

Tell me about your family's history with the above.

I'm sure that I lost more friends due to lockdown-induced depression, drug/alcohol relapse and suicide than you lost family to COVID.

If we should have learned anything it's that modern medicine has spoiled our species in that you can now live an excessively long time with extremely unhealthy lifestyles.

Barely two generations ago dying from common colds, flus and even minor cut and scrape injuries was just everyday life. Maybe half of the children in a family might die before reaching adulthood. One particularly strong (lab-engineered) cold made the rounds and people want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the sky is on fire.

In the context of human history and coronaviruses, COVID-19 is absolutely a nothingburger.

Victim-blaming is unhelpful and not productive, nor does it move the conversation forward in a meaningful way. My mother was, while in her 70s, perfectly healthy prior to Covid. No diabetes, walking and exercising regularly. I only wish I ate as healthy as my mother. It attacked her heart. Now she has no energy, cannot stand up, is on many heart medications, because Covid-19 destroyed parts of her heart. My neighbor, who died, was in his early 40s, a violinist in a major orchestra. My best friend's mother, in her 60s, was healthy and vibrant. Died months after infection with low energy, brain fog, trouble breathing. I'm sure there are 1000s of examples like these from others. They say 2MM died of Covid-19, but the true cost was likely 5x that number when the dust is settled. You need to re-think your value system, it lacks humanity.

What a sad little world view you have. Of course it doesn't matter in the long run. But it matters to people alive right now. Which is why we do anything even though its all pointless. I guess you wouldn't care about your life or a family members life being taken by covid since its a nothingburger though huh?

My whole entire family works in medicine and isn't killing themselves with junk food and bad lifestyles, so even though most of us got COVID-19, none of us had the comorbidities that made it serious. Even among our overweight and elderly.

If somebody's so fat and unhealthy that that they're gassed out from walking off the front porch, I'm not alarmed that a cold virus finished them off. I'm also not out here screaming about COVID, I'm screaming about the importance of diet, exercise and self-control instead.

If they're of advanced age, it's (just) slightly more sad but none of us gets to live forever. Everyone will get cancer too if they live long enough. If you want to radically alter how the rest of us live our lives because you or a family member can't stop shoving McDonalds and cake into your face, I'm not fucking having it.

What I AM sympathetic to are people who have to sequester themselves from society (and did so already in the absence of COVID-19) because they have very serious and usually rare disorders. But then maybe these gain of function labs should think twice before they play with fire and break containment.

As with most things in life, garbage in, garbage out.

Also I'll say this right here as a former fatty and current fat-shamer and fat-nonacceptant.

The absolute worst thing about ACA is that it made it illegal to charge obese people higher insurance rates. It's basically stealing money out of the rest of our pockets who have to work with you -- and thank God being an unhealthy mess isn't a protected class because I would never hire somebody to work with me who has a terrible lifestyle.

Japan does this right. Your workplace and the public health service makes you get a check up every year and will follow up with you to make sure you're on a plan to get healthier. And they will both encourage you and also nag the shit out of you until you do it. The fact that we don't follow such a practice here I find almost barbaric.

Please seek help sad little man.

We had 16% of all the world's COVID-19 deaths in the US despite only 4% of the world's population.

Even our own CDC said we had that the reason we had the worst impact from the disease because we have the sickest (read: fattest) people.

We have more old people with existing problems (eg obesity), COVID ripped through them like crazy. The biggest indicator was age, and our life expectancy was falling behind the rest of the developed world before the pandemic.

That doesn't make sense. You're saying more people died because of age but we have less old people than the rest of the world and 4x the deaths.

I'm literally talking about obesity being the main problem. We have more old AND obese people, for sure.

The part to focus on is obese, not old.

No, I said we had more old people with comorbidities and our life expectancy has been falling behind (not rising) compared to other western developed countries.

If you look at the COVID death rates, age was by far the dominating factor of death, not obesity. But obesity was probably significant in those who died at younger and older ages (though pronounced in older people, since an order of magnitude more died due to COVID than young people). I doubt we are really disagreeing much here, but obesity was a drag on mortality before the pandemic, and will continue to be a problem after.

I wouldn’t take too much stock in comparing USA COVID deaths to the rest of the world, we are really liberal in flagging COVID deaths (eg a 90 year old dies of a heart attack while having COVID is counted as a COVID death), other countries had different standards, especially developing ones without access to as much testing. What we should really focus on is excess deaths overall, and how a life expectancy changed during the pandemic.

Sounds like we need an Operation Warp Speed 2, this time before things get out of hand.

It’s my laypersons understanding that one of the big benefits of the mRNA vaccines is that all that production capacity can be rapidly switched to a new vaccine.

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