That's suggestive there are far more than the 29 reported California cases - with cases generally remaining mild enough to earn no special attention over routine respiratory infections.
I agree there are likely cases not being detected, but there are lots of flying natural reservoirs who also poop in sewer watersheds (no one's keeping them sterile, after all). They may also be getting magnified by agricultural sources; California does a much better job of testing, but there are very likely positive farms that haven't been found yet.
I think it's important not to overstate what this means. Most likely, the kid had some other upper respiratory tract infection with the symptoms coming from that and the H5 may well have been an incidental finding, especially since they have likely already recovered based on the timeframe I'm aware of. One potential theory is exposure to wild bird droppings. Due to the circumstances of the case, we may never find out exactly what the child came in contact with.
Sick with bird flu, not sick from bird flu! In other words, we can blissfully ignore it and anybody who tells us otherwise is just trying to attack us!
But sure, it's a valid technical point. The problem is that it dovetails right into the just world fallacy.
Putting the "with not of" part aside, in this particular case the child is positive for other respiratory viruses. Given that there wasn't much H5 present and the CDC release says as much, the other respiratory virus(es) found would be a more likely explanation for their illness than H5.
This doesn't say anything about the virulence or likelihood of serious illness in H5 generally, just here. We really don't know overall yet.
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"
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.
My first thought: imagine this child growing up and deciding to google this event in their life and finding dozens of strangers speculating, arguing, and joking about the situation
Public perception of healthcare is far worse, so far fewer people would attempt to limit transmission and protect vulnerable populations. On the other hand, we now have experience in handling respiratory disease pandemics and would likely fare better at actually medically supporting patients (avoid early intubation, etc.). So overall, probably much worse since population dynamics would flood our healthcare system, even if it has improved.
Way worse. The public perception in my community is that the response to covid was hyper-exaggerated. Unless people they knew in real life were dying, they would basically never go through the masking and quarantine again.
As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast.
The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't.
The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic.
... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking hundreds of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
Or, “these people were going to die anyways”. I know someone whose father died and rather than admit that he exposed his own dad to something that may have killed him, he took this really odd position.
Absolutely worse if RFK Jr.'s nomination makes it through Congress. I know career staff can take their time making changes the CDC head wants, but they can only be so slow in the face of pressure from the agency director and president.
There are conspiracy and anti-vaccine cranks all through the Trump cabinet e.g. Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General, Dr Oz at Medicare, Marty Makary at FDA.
Marty Makary is neither anti-vaccine nor a conspiracy theorist. He's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, author of the paper that turned into the "checklist manifesto", as well as multiple NY Times best-selling books on medicine. Please stop.
I doubt people are willing to be bullied into shutting down their businesses and fully putting their lives and children's educations on hold because white coat wearing talking heads on TV told them it would only take two weeks.
Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."
> specifically which experts
Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.
The biggest fuckup last time was people's general confusion and lack of preparation.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
I think better. We can create mRNA vaccines quickly now and those that want to take them can do so and reap the benefits. Those that don’t want to are free to die and maybe the next election won’t be 50.5% majority. We don’t need much to shift the tide.
I need you to know how sick and callous that "it will be good if they die" attitude is to me. I know you think it's just, but as an outsider who isn't as politically inflamed as you are, it looks truly sick.
That's suggestive there are far more than the 29 reported California cases - with cases generally remaining mild enough to earn no special attention over routine respiratory infections.
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