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Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

I’ll start worrying when there’s person to person transfer.

Have you run a model on how many mutations are required for sustained transfer? (I have).

I have to say: This attitude that "I'll worry when the system starts crashing" is very un-hacker-like. Aside from dismissing minority hypotheses until disaster strikes, it lacks the ethos of seeing prevention as a valuable investment. In other words, if this were an interview, I would never hire someone who said "I'll worry about it when shit hits the fan".

I think it's a very reasonable attitude. The person your replying too is stating their personal position. I'm also unlikely to worry personally at the moment because there are other people much better suited to do that whose job it is to do that. There are some many things going on at any one time that reducing what we personally need to be concerned about is a pretty valid strategy.

I'm not saying one should spend one's life planning for nuclear war, H5N1 and a zombie apocalypse. Filter out first what rises to your threshold of concern. But as with a codebase that you know might have vulnerabilities: Consider what those might be, and start to prepare for them proactively. Just saying fuckit is neither useful nor a good look. Unit test your life.

> Have you run a model on how many mutations are required for sustained transfer? (I have).

Interesting! Can you share some reads on that?

So, consider this a starting point...

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/3/23-1098_article

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922066/

Influenza A mutation rates: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/110197v1

My models are damn simple, though. It doesn't matter if you need 6 or 12 mutations. (Or it only really changes the kickoff by a few weeks at most). It doesn't matter if those incubate in 1 million or 6 million human/pigs/cattle. The times begin to converge in a very short range. What we do know is that it took about six months to develop a dozen mutations to go from birds to dairy cattle, and it took 4 months to detect that, in March. Any way you model it we have between 2 weeks and 2 months. Before humans start coughing it at each other and dying like masses of sea lions already did.

Nope.

Even if I had the ability to do so, what good would it do me? What good would it do anyone? There’s literally no way I would be able to impact its mutation rate.

I’m going to keep writing software and raising my family.

There IS nothing we can do about it. It seems likely that we will see some form of outbreak in humans. The severity is an unknown. What we can do is have a plan to deal with it as best as we can. Keep some extra supplies and medications to last for a few weeks if it gets risky to go outside. I'm not going down a list as everyone's situation is different, but most reasonable steps you can take are pretty cheap and easy to do in the here and now, before panic buying and price gouging start. The WHO seems concerned. https://www.who.int/news/item/12-07-2023-ongoing-avian-influ...

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