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".
Interesting! Can you share some reads on that?
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.
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.