The U.S. may be missing human cases of bird flu, scientists say
text.npr.org
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Personally, I get daycare-related colds/flus all the time and don't go visit a testing center each time
I read somewhere that scientists mutated it and that it's only 2 mutations away from spreading human to human and that the mutations are such that they could happen in nature.
I am a bit worried of the bird flu and I am very confused over the fact that we care so little about it and keep trading with countries that have horrible animal care which probably is the root cause of these diseases.
Humans have been living closely with poultry for hundreds of years without some super-deadly virus jumping from birds to humans. Your prior should be that the chance of it happening is very low.
Sure, there were a lot of farmers having some animals but not in the large scale industry that we have today. That is a very modern phenomenon.
'Super antibody' fights off flu
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14324901 [2011]
At the centre: influenza A virus ribonucleoproteins
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5619696/ [2015]
[Nat Rev Microbiol. 2015 Jan; 13(1): 28–41. ]
It's okay guys, it delivers value to shareholders.
- shareholder
If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite for masks? Lockdowns? New vaccines? For many people it's quite low. For others it's quite high. And the disagreement between these groups will become another political flashpoint.
Right wing bot networks continue to harass anti-COVID activists to reinforce the hegemonic idea that it's over so that rich people can clean up.
Here's a joke: What's the difference between the right and liberals on COVID? About 6 months.
You could see the blip from covid in global mortality data. You can't see it now.
You were sold "herd immunity", which means people don't get sick because the disease is prevented by immunity. Instead, we just have total society-wide saturation with COVID. It's a sick, fucked up situation.
Having said all of that, in the absence of strong evidence for human-human transmission, this should not keep you up at night.
There's absolutely no evidence for this as we have no data on the infection fatality rate, only on the case fatality rate, which like with COVID initially is an order of magnitude or two higher, because the vast majority of people with respiratory infections aren't specifically tested for H1N1.
Admittedly the odds are stacked in my favor a bit - I'm a pretty extreme introvert in a quiet small town and have been WFH since 2012. I will never accept another position that isn't 100% remote, and avoiding getting sick is part of that for sure.
Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days - which is awful. But the early numbers were ~5-10%
Vaccinated people had a significantly lower chance of death but the overall death rate was so tiny it basically doesn't move the needle.
Are you sure? Pre vaccine rollout across all ages in USA, I've seen less than .5% IFR, and an order of magnitude less than that if you constrain to ages 0-59.
With the inundation of constant bad news that we were under, you'll still find people thinking covid killed 20% of anyone who caught it, and that will probably last forever.
I don't think we should worry at all. We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics.
You can see yourself https://www.healthline.com/health/worst-disease-outbreaks-hi...
It can happen, but the chances seem vanishingly low. Even the Hong Kong flu outbreak had only a 0.2% fatality rate.
Isn't that the exact story of the Spanish Flu? Low fatality rate at first which then mutated into a horribly fatal strain after the first wave? Isn't that why we took COVID so seriously from the get-go - the fear of mutation?
Paralytic polio, which has a fatality rate of 5-10%, is still endemic in parts of Africa and southern Asia.
Back in 2002 SARS killed 9.5% (783) of the 8000 people infected with it.
So, I call bullshit on "We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics." (and for another thing, most of the really bad infection diseases are viral, not bacterial. Antibiotics do little to nothing).
> 100% fatality rate
Case fatality rate.
> Back in 2002 SARS killed 9.5% (783) of the 8000 people infected with it.
Of the identified cases of people infected.
> If, like COVID, it had a several day asymptomatic period, it would wipe out the planet within months.
Wrong for so many reasons
HIV is what obviously comes to mind.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/library/slidesets/cdc-hiv-survei...
The secondary infection thing is a technicality, the mechanism via which someone who has HIV is killed. But it’s not really a misnomer to say the disease is deadly.
You are misreading the charts you are citing btw, your chart shows close to 100% fatality rate, 16 deaths per 100,000 people (with and without HIV)
I use a mask when I go out because my wife has health issues that would complicate any colds etc. It's really nice to not have to deal with several colds a year.
Masks became political. I've had some double-takes in a couple of stores, but mostly people have ignored my mask wearing. Thankfully the grocery store I frequent serves an aging population who are far more likely to wear masks now.
I know that some, probably even in this thread, will swear that masks are useless. I know you know that, you're not going to convince me and I'm not going to convince you. Can we skip the arguing and try to reach common ground?
I would happily wear masks if they're more convenient.
As a fellow autistic person I find masking pretty helpful honestly, if nothing else it reduces the constant mental strain from having to do so much other the other kind of masking, in terms of facial expressions and what not. I also find it tends to be a interpreted as a signal to not engage in a bunch of performative small talk, which I don't exactly mind either.
Would that be acceptable to your social group do you think?
But I'd rather prozelitize about taking measures for one's defense (everything to support the immune system, vitamin D, proper nutrition, etc), than the theatrical masking we've seen so far.
Again, if it's serious than at least wear a mask that offers some believable protection.
Even with millions of deaths, we were incredibly lucky that CV-19 had only a ~2% case/fatality rate. Many other diseases are far higher, including the Avian Flu H5N1 at over 50% in humans.
Being healthy is a false sense of security (i.e., you don't know what you are talking about and are spreading ignorance). For example the group the 1918 Flu pandemic killed most was yoing healthy males (incl my wife's GGP). Why? Because it caused a huge immune system response called a cytokine storm, and the most healthy males had the strongest immune response, and it killed them (yes, our biological system has a few bugs).
The entire job of diseases is to overcome healthy subjects and spread despite this.
Stop spreading ignorant wishful thinking.
Wearing a mask offers much less protection to yourself and others than taking measures for your immune health, but that's somehow controversial and never discussed at a societal level. I'm still shocked vitamin D supplementation was barely mentioned during COVID. But authorities only cared for theatrical measures, and imitating each other so they don't stand out.
Your immune system works well, but when we're talking about human pathogens, they are specifically organisms that have figured out how to defeat several levels of countermeasures and will harm you.
More on respirator physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAdanPfQdCA
EDIT: I see above you've noted respirators work. Masks also work, but not perfectly. See this video as to why surgical masks are still useful. In fact Taiwan achieved zero COVID using almost exclusively universal masking until more transmissible variants showed up.
COVID is remarkable among human pathogens because it is so damn transmissible. High percentage mask wearing completely stomps out weaker viruses (we eliminated a flu strain in 2020). COVID is almost as transmissible as measles (R0 for Omicron is commonly estimated above 8 and as high as 24), so it takes an array of countermeasures or high quality countermeasures to arrest it. Still, mask wearing will reduce the number of people infected per a unit time, making environments much safer.
Now that we are in a regime where R0 is less applicable since people have some immunity to COVID, the transmission rate is closer to 1-3. This is something masks can manage to stomp so long as there is partial immunity.
Again, I hope the general public never accepts this ever again. I don't want to live in a world so obsessed with safety and safety theater that it accepts such a radical transformation of the public space. So what Taiwan does it.
I hope the info you shared is valuable to someone, I don't have the inclination to make my case in further detail, so I'll just stay at this level of argumentation: the tradeoff is unacceptable to me, and, I hope, to the majority. If it ever comes down to this again, I'll make a serious effort to relocate to somewhere still sane.
But it will NOT prevent infection.
A properly fitted N95/N99 mask will. It takes about 700 viral particles (early strains) entering the airways to start an infection (obviously variance involved). Cutting out 95-99% of the particles you breath in an exposure event gives you 20X to 100X margin to prevent infection.
When good masks are generally used, those effects are multiplied together, as the contagious person's spreading of viruse particles is reduced by 20-100X, and your mask reduces that attenuated stream by another 20-100X.
These effects are why the R0 of all airborne diseases is cut when most people take measures. We can see this because while the spread of the more contagious CV-19 was reduced, entire strains of influenza went EXTINCT. Wiped out forever. They could thrive in an unmasked population, but died out when people even masked badly and inconsistently.
Ironically I'm about 2 weeks off some sort of what was probably some weird viral infection (not COVID, not traditional flu, not strep). Very well could have been bird flu, although there's a possibility that was also caused by an (insurance forced) asthma medication change that I possibly had a moderate allergic reaction to. In any case, I now have an approved prior auth and am back on the old med.
I remember the feeling. I wore a 3M N95 mask into a Trader Joe's in the SF Bay Area mid-December 2019 and received gawks and offhand verbal insults (jeers). The nature of the threat was then unknown and epidemiological data later showed community spread was already occurring, so it seemed an entirely prudent precaution even in retrospect.
OTOH, people wearing masks outside now when no one else is around and without evidence to show COVID transmission can happen in these conditions, it must be a practice for non-medical reasons.
Best to apply good, individual judgment with precautions because some people with irrational tribal beliefs are intent on proving cigarettes or COVID "can't" kill them.
Actually, masking outdoors is fantastic for my allergies, which are one of the main triggers for my asthma. To be clear I use the 3M Aura 9210, which is a very good N95 (actually meets N99 standards based on independent tests, but no one buys those so they are labeled as N95). Very good against my broad spectrum allergies to "the outside" (dust, mold, ragweed, pollen, etc).