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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

I would hope that the majority learned that hygiene and masking are effective enough for us to continue to live our lives, but I doubt it.

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The good news is that masks and hand sanitizers are much more effective against the flu, as seen in the pandemic when it virtually disappeared.

You won’t want to live your life normally if there is a 60% mortality rate airborne virus around.

Sure, if that proves to be the case I would happily lock myself up. I can quarantine with the best of them. But the fact of the matter is that we don't know a lot about H5N1 infections in people due to the extremely low number of known infections. The individual in question here appears to be having more mild symptoms.

The number of infections is low in the US but we have a lot of data from China and south east Asia where it’s more prevalent. 800 people have been infected in total so far with about a 50% mortality rate since the late 90s.

Do we know the rate they tested at? Do we think it's possible they caught everyone infected?

To be clear in this, I took COVID very seriously, I still carry a mask in my pocket and use it when I travel, but I'm trying to be realistic about the situation.

> Do we think it's possible they caught everyone infected?

It's not. The CDC only caught this case because they are proactively testing workers at farms that have confirmed animal outbreaks.

> "The patient reported eye redness (consistent with conjunctivitis), as their only symptom, and is recovering." [1]

Diseases like ebola or hendra virus that actually have 50%+ mortality rates don't have mild forms like this.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html

A virus with that kind of mortality rate would have no chance to spread very far anyway, so all good!

That depends on the time difference between when it becomes transmissible and when it causes death. If it's short, it won't spread much. If it's long, it'll spread all over the place.

> A virus with that kind of mortality rate would have no chance to spread very far anyway, so all good!

Give it a two week incubation time (not that far-fetched) and it will spread far and wide.

There are over a million dead in the United States for whom your statement is not true.

Imagine how many more would have died if no one washed their hands.

Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic. Hand washing after the first few months was mostly kept as hygiene theatre and for preventing transmission of infections other than covid.

If you only wash your hands because of "hygiene theatre" please don't invite me to dinner.

That's not what they said. Read it again.

> Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic.

No, "we" didn't. The CDC and, by extension, much of the coverage was insisting on surface sanitization even though there was plenty of evidence for airborne transmission already. I distinctly remembered going with the CDC recommendations until a friend pointed me out to a bunch of published articles with a preponderance of evidence for airborne transmission. It took many months for the CDC and other agencies to change their stance, by which time the whole 'surface cleaning' was already entrenched in everyone's minds.

A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.

Aren’t they not at all far from us, in any dimension whatsoever, except that they are not literally us?

99% of them are far from you physically. If you weren’t personally affected it probably doesn’t matter to you.

I was unlucky and lost 3 grandparents between my wife and I. Matters more to me probably.

I doubt that they're disproportionately far from my physically.

I am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer.

The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.

“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.

It is not clear to me that any significant number of deaths were prevented by lockdowns once vaccines were available, only delayed by a maximum of 3 years. Everyone still got covid. Some people didn’t make it through the filter, that’s what new diseases are like.

Given that people are still dying of COVID, "a maximum of 3 years" is incorrect.

Whatever the number of dead, it wouldn’t be true for them. If we don’t take precaution X then Y more people die, but that doesn’t mean every X is worth it.

My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).

Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.

That doesn't make sense. If that were the case then the cold & flu wouldn't intermingle, though they very much do. And now, when fewer mitigations are around, we see people hospitalized with COVID, influenza, and RSV. Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

> Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.

Here in Alberta it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu, so it's still very much present. Unfortunately, it's impossible to argue further because of the lack of population testing (Alberta only tests those hospitalized), but more people here were found to have COVID this season than influenza[1].

If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/dashboard/respiratory-virus-das...

I'm not being clear. The interference appears to be related to how recently you were infected with something else. If lots of people around you are getting COVID, then they aren't getting something else. Once most people are immune to it, they aren't getting infected with it anymore and other viruses can compete again.

> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu

The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.

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