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- 'Long flu' is not a thing (it's actually possible but it's rare, mild and short)
- Our baseline immune competence would probably be much higher (even though neutralizing antibodies to H5N1 are low in the population.) This should be particularly true for people whose first flu as children was with Influenza A.
- Unlike Covid, no reason to suspect H5N1 will cause diabetes, heart disease, or various other kinds of permanent damage. It's probably also unlikely to cross the blood-brain barrier.
- There are various vaccine efforts already in the pipeline.
I wouldn't expect it to be like Covid in 2020 but maybe like in 2023, after it went from the 3rd leading cause of death to the 10th.
We have no real idea what a highly human-to-human infectious novel H5N1 variant would do in humans, long-term, precisely because we haven’t infected enough people with it to find out.
There's no reason to suspect the next pandemic will stand out in the same ways, or as much in general, particularly if it's Influenza.
There is, in other words, no reason to suspect any particular outcome. Given how poorly we handled the still-ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic there is zero reason for optimism.
The information we had at the time indicated that H5N1 could result in multiple organ failure. It's been literally two decades (!) and I couldn't tell you the specifics, but yes, H5N1 was deemed to be possibly 'special' in some way.
I'd link you to some resources about this, but your googling's as good as mine, and my information is indeed twenty years out of date.
All the same, as tempting as it is to reasssure oneself with rules of thumb, it's even better to reassure (or perhaps unsettle) oneself with genuine facts, and there's no shortage of these regarding H5N1. I know with certainty that we've been worried about it for decades :)
That is not at all demonstrated scientifically.
"Long Covid" took quite a while to be demonstrated and we were monitoring everything like a hawk. "Long flu" has no such monitoring.
As soon as we had the tools and started looking for correlations, the collateral damage that viruses do pops up (HPV and cancer; Epstein-Barr and MS; Herpes and dementia).
Given that, the Bayesian prior favors "Long Flu exists and we just haven't paid attention" rather than "Long Flu doesn't exist."
My suspicion is that we're going to find more and more of these correlations as our medical ability to deal with viruses improves.
It wasn't demonstrated because of the monitoring. It was demonstrated by the droves of desperate patients who kept banging on the clinics' doors and wouldn't take no for an answer. Claiming that 'long flu' is the same thing is (IMO) just a different variety of Covid denialism.
I have not done any kind of research into if the Wuhan lableak story is true or not, but the admitted supression by the govt has made sure I cannot trust any kind of conclusion around it.
We sometimes call that education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origin_of_SARS-Co...
unfortunately I'm not able to work out how the claim in the article follows from the linked documents, so effectively I'm only able to go off the "headline".
Second, note that all that news report actually includes is a call to declassify a classified document, the only non-redacted portions of which are section headings that, for all we normies know, may have been authored by MTG or any number of nutjobs like her. One of the easiest possible ways for a partisan committee to propagandize is to produce documents with contents that can’t (for whatever reason) be declassified and full of leading headings that support their own circularly-arrived-at conclusion.
Virologists and epidemiologists the world over are extremely comfortable that it was a zoonotic transfer. The genome of the virus supports that, as does all available backtracing of the early transmissions. There is zero publicly disclosed physical evidence of a lab origin, there’s just a non-zero chance of a lab origin. Well there’s also a non-zero chance the Earth is flat, the moon landings were faked, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a genius-level intellect… but me, I’d want physical evidence of any of those before staking myself against the consensus of those with real expertise in the matter.
So while we don't know if it was a lab leak, we know that the top people that would be the ones involved in it, tried to stop the discussion about it and then lied about trying to hide it. One can make their own assumptions as to why top officials would illegally try to stop discussion of fake conspiracy theories that they don't have relation to.