> But even if the actual case fatality rate were 10 times lower – about 5% – it would still be a serious virus to contend with. The case fatality rate for the ancestral strain of Covid-19 was estimated to be around 2.6%, for example.<p>Ugh. The news media never learns [1]:<p>1) The <i>IFR</i> for Covid-19 was not 2.6%. Less than a tenth of that, actually (yes, even for the ancestral strains).<p>2) "CFR" is a made up number, because it depends on what cases you count. If you count only a sample of people in the ICU, you can make the CFR look horrible for pretty much any illness. We made this mistake during covid!<p>3) You <i>can see the same mistake in progress here</i>, because you can't just take this sample of <i>deaths you looked for</i>, divide it by the <i>cases you know about</i>, scale it down by a random factor (that you pulled out of your butt), and then panic about the result [2].<p>[1] or more likely: never <i>wants</i> to learn, because fear drives clicks.<p>[2] for those who wonder: the right way to do this is random sampling -- you at least have to sample the population randomly to estimate seroprevalence correctly.
This is concerning, but not worth panicking about yet. The person had direct contact with infected birds, so there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.<p>For those wanting to learn more about bird flu, and flu in general, I highly recommend the recent Scott Alexander post:<p><a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wanted-to" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wan...</a><p>[Edited for clarity]
I am not going to panic about it at this point. But, if it does develop into a pandemic, I am quite certain that the initial response will be more along the lines of "let's just see what happens. Gotta keep the economy going, right?"
I don't know if this will help anyone, but my sister is an expert in this area. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a couple decades of experience. She was the head of vaccine-preventable epidemiology for one of the states in the U.S., and is now the head of epidemiology data and informatics for that state.<p>Over the holidays, I was asking her about bird flu because some of the things I was reading were frightening, but I wasn't sure what to make of them.<p>When I showed her this paper that is linked to in another comment here <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2415890" rel="nofollow">https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2415890</a>, she responded with this:<p>Everyone will react differently to the flu. There are kids in her exact situation that have that kind of reaction to the normal flu. However, it is still concerning. If the virus does cause more severe illness overall and it does mutate to become person-to-person, we are in trouble.<p>That is the hardest thing about public health—you just don't know which way things will swing. So you are always on the edge of either overreacting or underreacting.
Can we just preemptively start vaccinating against this strain? we have the vaccine and seems like a low risk thing to get started on. even if no evidence of human to human transmission.
Another pandemic is surely coming as the US has already lost control. It'll get ugly real fast with no safeguards whatsoever.<p><a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattle-poultry-pandemic-cdc/" rel="nofollow">https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattl...</a>