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.
Alameda county's original PR: https://health.alamedacountyca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/1...
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 people's desire to rationalize why they themselves are unaffected.
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.
Wastewater detection is showing H5 bird flu all over California: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/wwd-h5.html
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.
Wastewater surveys pick up animal-to-animal or animal-to-human transmission strains too.
It's very hard to know what to do here, because that's also detecting contaminated milk dumped into the wastewater system, which is a massive signal but also not human.
why is contaminated milk being dumped into the wastewater system? and what is contaminated milk even have to do with H5N1? it's avain flu and last I checked birds don't have tiddies
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.
Note: wild bird crap with H5N1 in it gets washed into storm drains, and in many communities this would wind up in wastewater and be detected, so this is probably not direct evidence of human H5N1 infections
Would that happen without rain? and I am not sure there has been recent rain in Los Angeles?
> 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.
I can see the lines forming at Costco for toilet paper and water already.
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
I wouldn't worry. By that point nobody will be able to find any actual history over the roar of AI-generated SEO spam.
Whatever happens, they'll find a suitably comforting and/or enraging retelling of history that reinforces contemporaneous power structures.
As opposed to todays algorithmically generated SEO spam? I find the AI generated SEO spam at least comprehensible. By and large the useful information retrieval age ended 10 years ago.
If (and I emphasise IF) H5N1 led to a severe pandemic in humans, the assumption that it would play out like covid is a dangerous one.
Covid (pre-vaccine) posed an extremely low risk to children, little risk to young adults, a bit of a risk to the middle-aged, and a lot of risk to the elderly.
The 1918 flu pandemic, by contrast, killed people across the age range, disproportionately including young adults.
Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
> Were that to be repeated (and, again, there is no reason to think it will) I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I'd like to think that, but I also think history is rife with countless examples of people literally dying on the hill of their own beliefs.
> I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.
I think the anti-vaxx crowd will fight back much harder against vaccines in any future event, at least at first. They made it through Covid fine, the ones that are alive, why not the next plandemic?
I was just thinking today what a total shit show Covid was between shortages of masks and vaccines, the misinformation online, and the chaotic messaging from the government. It was a circus. I really don't want to go through that again.
"Ah shit, here we go again..."
But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or worse?
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?
> Unless people they knew in real life were dying
Many of them still don't blame not getting the vaccine.
The fault is instead with hospitals not prescribing hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
Christ, please bring back universal masking and distancing. That two years without so much as a sniffle in our house was magical.
That's my definition of better. Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
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.
Yea the general public learned nothing from COVID (more like learned negative from it), but the medical system learned a lot. We could be prepared to handle the next global pandemic, our institutions are probably better prepared. But we won’t because the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant, so overall we’re going to fuck it up even worse next time.
Yeah, I don't think people are going to tolerate going through the lockdowns, masking and everything else all over again.
People seem far more affected by the economic fallout, inflation, etc to do it all again.
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).
The biggest fuckup last time was relying on the general public to voluntarily do the right thing. It felt like we were in a leaky boat at sea with half the population trying to plug the leaks as fast as they can while the other half were deliberately drilling more holes.
We won't again permit the economy and life in general to grind to a halt for months on end unless it's as dangerous as polio or the black plague.
So that's better.
Fantastic! Except you can't know in advance. So, the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with. Otherwise, by the time you decide it's dangerous enough to do something, you've already got an uncontrollable spread on your hands.
In terms of mortality COVID-19 was way, way worse than polio ever was.
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.
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I think there’s almost no chance we’d lock down like we did before, so the health impact would be a bit worse, but the economic and social impacts would be much less bad (almost nonexistent).
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Ha.
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.
Don't we have a stockpile of flu antivirals?
You're probably referring to the Strategic National Stockpile. There are approximately 55 million doses of Tamiflu on hand as of earlier this year, though the ASPR generally keeps this number under its hat. In the meantime, there is an H5N1 candidate vaccine, and it would probably be able to get to market fairly quickly (compare with the H1N1 vaccine rollout in 2009).
My understanding is that there is also some stockpiled H5 vaccine from years ago. Supposedly it's not a perfect match for the current strain going around in cattle but it's pretty good.
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Yeah the government has been heavily ramping up production of influenza antigen that should be effective against this strain the past year of so and funding more targeted mrna type vaccine research for h5n1
we won't be as blindsided or unprepared as we were by covid for this one
From the perspective of someone who works in public health: We are less prepared as a society, and have fewer tools at our disposal.
Uhm, I would not be surprised if Trump's administration outright bans vaccination and masking this time around.
Nah, no money in that. It's more likely the Executive Trumposphere will try to put itself in no-oversight charge of where the supplies flow... so that they can allocate them as partisan rewards and punishments to different states.
Much worse. The incoming health person is a vaccine denier. Which could put the US in the spot where we will not develop vaccines and lots of people could die.
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.
Assuming anti-vax administrators allow us to take new mRNA vaccines, which is far from certain.
But yeah mRNA is a game changer for quick vaccine response. In theory after sequencing the virus a new vaccine could be in testing days later.
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.
Can you tell me specifically which experts said it would only take two weeks?
We will ignore the obvious solution. End the dairy industry altogether. There’s very little animal milk offers to humans anyways other than whatever the U.S. govt has drummed up through marketing to sell otherwise unsellable oversupply.
It’s an ecological disaster, a GHG disaster, a health disaster, an allergen disaster, a biohazard, and a complete and utter moral and ethical disaster.
There’s nothing animal milk offers that we don’t have a dozen alternatives for already.