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Comment by warrenm | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think a lot of people are in "test fatigue"

And that is whether or not they think Covid was planned, leaked, or totally random

Relatively high false-positive rates[0] with the PCR test for Covid, imo, factor into that

That, and not wanting to get stuck in some kind of lockdowns again (the negative benefits of which are still being discussed and debated) ... especially for something which, odds are, you have practically no chance of being exposed to ... and most people are going to say, "why test?"

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[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7934325/#:~:tex....

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And also because we're not really going to get very sick from it.

The biggest downside experienced is by the poultry industry which is squarely to blame for this anyway with their high density farming. So screw them.

> And also because we're not really going to get very sick from it.

I mean, the death rate from human cases of H5N1 is about _50%_ (this is likely an overestimate, as mild cases are unlikely to be detected, but it is _not great_). The upside is that, thus far, it doesn't seem to be spreading human->human in significant numbers (though that has happened at least once). The risk, of course, is that human->human spread becomes easier, as it has with various other flu strains and SARS-COV1/2.

The worst case is very, very bad, worse than the 1918 H1N1 pandemic.

It's clearly an overestimate, as literally 60 people have gotten tested in the US. Mild cases are certain to be undetected because tests are just not around unless there's extreme suspicion.

If it was very severe we'd know it already. You can't calculate percentages based on single digit numbers.

It could become easier to spread sure but there's no point worrying about this until it happens. We've already had one pandemic that brought the world to a standstill, there's no sense in talking the world into another one that probably won't even happen (don't forget this isn't the first flu pandemic they tried to scare us about). Especially in America people are often hysterical about safety risks (yet live in country full of gun crime and crazy expensive healthcare). Also, healthcare officials go scare up sentiments because it's their job. Normal people just live their lives in crowded subways, bars again and don't care if anyone coughs :P

Just worry about it if it actually happens. And react with caution, as many covid measures weren't actually needed (e.g. the handwashing was total nonsense, as were the curfews).

I mean, I'm pretty overweight, have a stationary job, I drink too much and I live in a busy city with much traffic and bad pollution. Those things are more likely to kill me yet I don't worry enough to allow them to stop enjoying my life :)

> It's clearly an overestimate, as literally 60 people have gotten tested in the US.

Those numbers are largely from outbreaks that happened a few years back, in some cases with more extensive testing. The current US outbreak is (so far, and hopefully it continues that way) small enough that you can't read much into the numbers either way.

> If it was very severe we'd know it already.

Not if human-human transmission is nearly impossible with the current strain, as it seems to be. This shouldn't be _too_ reassuring, as the same went for H1N1 until 1918 (in the next two years it killed 50 million people). H5N1 kills people via a cytokine swarm, same as H1N1, though it seems to be more dramatic, and like H1N1 tends to preferentially kill young people.

Like, I'm not saying "panic, it's definitely going to be the next COVID only worse, shut everything down", but it deserves more attention from the authorities than it's necessarily getting.

Interestingly, some of the more pointless COVID precautions (especially the early emphasis on gloves and things) probably showed up because the WHO was so fixated on the idea that the next pandemic would be either H1N1 or H5N1, and fomites are a big deal for influenza in a way that they're not for COVID.

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