It's so weird how this article keeps talking about H5N1 'happening' in 2009. The disease took off in Asia 6 years earlier (as the CDC acknowledges up front [1]) and imho part of the reason for its limited ultimate impact was that many countries took it seriously and (formally or voluntarily) instituted public health measures like masking and strategic isolation to limit transmission [2]. Disease outbreaks that might threaten the US are nowadays greeted with either panciky demands for total isolation (eg the Ebole outbreak 10 years ago) or aggressively indifferent. I found out about the WHO report [3] on the first known H5N2 human death (which described the risk to the public as 'low') because of an organized effort to launch a viral campaign on Twitter; proponents were insisting that this was the latest effort to steal an election or otherwise sap precious American bodily fluids, and spent the whole day trying to make 'DO NOT COMPLY' trend.
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/communication-resources/bir...
2 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/06/birdflu.davidb...
3 - https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...