Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

General information I found (after a -casual- search, not rigorous):

"current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT), and "less than 100 Americans in 2024 known to be infected", "bird to human (not human to human yet) transmission"

- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html ('situation' report)

- https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/prevention/index.html (prevention)

- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-fl... (mortality - need more detail e.g. healthcare access)

View on HN

> current public health risk is low", and (EDIT: NOT the current strain) "50% mortality rate WORLDWIDE" (/NOT)

I’ve not only found online articles that emphasize one focus over the other (low current rate of serious illness in US vs high long-window mortality rate worldwide), I’ve found articles that say both things a few paragraphs apart and don’t give the reader any lifeline for resolving the tension (strains/substrains, access to care, effective interventions, etc).

It’s a reasonable mistake, but when reasonable people see it I hope we’re reaching out to the publishers and asking them to clarify. Better comms improve trust and we’re still suffering from poor if reasonable comms in early 2020.

The current strain definitely does not have a 50% mortality rate.

It probably never did. Owing to the very limited testing then and even now, we have certainly missed a lot of cases.

That said, when they do end up in the hospital, they usually tend to be seriously ill. But that tells us little about the frequency of such high acuity cases. Still, severe influenza A subtypes are no joke.

One of the other things is the very high fatality rate from H5N1 generally has come, previous to this current strain, from primary cases with very intensive exposure to the avian-adapted strain, which is much more fond of receptors in the lower respiratory tract.

Those types of cases for many infectious diseases (i.e. MERS) are much more lethal than subsequent human-to-human infections.

Tx - updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com