H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
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Of course that _might_ be because it wasn’t that bad. But if you get to the point that it’s spreading that regularly you’ve already lost the ability to control it regardless of severity.
The same marketing problem existed with CVEs before Heartbleed. CVE-2014-0160 just doesn’t sound as frightening.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
Helping a local org give thousands of covid shots to seniors, people living in congregate housing, etc# was not easy because there was a lot of resistance from these communities due to the massive amounts of scary information out there.
If you want an example see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360815298_Foreign_M...
It really felt like there was literally nothing wholesome on anyones feeds for almost an entire year. Limited exposure from all non-profits i know of in my community. Significantly reduced views, deleted posts, erroneous flags, etc#.....
Meanwhile, everyone in every neighborhood gets nothing but images + videos of people dying or getting sick from "the jab", "5g", "the mark of the beast", etc#
Most of the women running these non-profits are former executives, local gov't officials, or workers in DHS or other like agencies. They're not stupid and incapable of "getting a message out". Something is and was seriously wrong w/ operation lightspeed.
In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.
This is one way how it spreads from farm to farm.
The political order of the New Deal lasted from roughly the Great Depression until about 1980. It wasn't just about government actions, it was more about how most people understood the world what it means to live a good life. That way of thinking about the world enabled collective action to improve the standard of living for most people, reduce poverty and inequality, give most people better health, housing and longer lives, faster and safer transportation, dignity in old age, etc.
But that political order was replaced by neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s and probably ended at the 2008 financial collapse. Again, it was not only a new political order, it was a shift in how people understood the world and their place in it. It was a time of deregulation, globalized commerce and capital flows, and the supremacy of market-based solutions. We got dramatic increases in inequality, unimaginable individual wealth combined with tent cities and a resurgence of infectious disease.
It's hard to imagine accomplishing big collective goals like building an interstate highway system, or implementing social security, or winning a world war against fascism, if all that hadn't been done already.
We might not even be capable of maintaining what previous generations were able to build from nothing.
I've spent my life swimming in the water of neoliberalism so it's almost impossible to imagine that there are alternatives. It feels like effective collective action for the greater good has never been possible and never will be.
Will be a grim scene.
If you want people to follow instructions, you need to demonstrate competence first.
EDIT: And don't forget the spicy dash of left wing politics that they added to all their decisions. BLM riots were ok, church gatherings not OK.
And all indoor gatherings were discouraged, not just church gatherings. Especially gatherings where people sing. Remember the choir rehearsal that killed two people? [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
in the US this cannot be further from the truth. we allow our children to be slaughtered in school, be hungry, be without health insurance. US cares more about 8754 other things before children
Even though this is true, it's not at the same scale.
Covid was killing more people in one week in Florida than nationally in school shootings the decade prior or something like this.
It was not even close.
But you are right. The "think of the children" is mainly performative and depends tremendously on who the children are.
agree with your post except this part… I honestly do not think it matters at all who the children are - the US entire system is setup to do exactly the opposite of thinking of the children. if there is money involved in any way children will get fucked (the most recent example being KOSA which was voted in senate almost unanimously only to then be killed by zuck paying everyone off…). I find all “think of chidren” garbage very amusing (though of course it is no laughing matter)
I think that the USA is one of the worst places to grow up in the "developed" world.
Countries far poorer and less "developed" do a much better job.
But I do maintain, the right children will be somewhat protected, even though it's overwhelming performative.
They'll just assume it was some demonic thing and double down on jesus.
Both the jew and scapegoating their neighbor Jesus from Guatemala.
Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
> I had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
We learned a lot of lessons in the 18 months after Feb 2020, including about long COVID and who was impacted. Were any of your conclusions reshaped in the face of later broad, consistent medical evidence?
If you were to consider your process of understanding COVID, was there ever a point where it could be fairly described as working backward from a conclusion?
I'm going to parse this and offer some personal impressions.
"One thing" (variant = "All I know") signals to me that my question - are you working backward from a conclusion - can't be considered at this time. It's a reasonable response and I hope you will consider my Q at a later time.
In considering your whole response, I get a vibe that you were justified or maybe vindicated. In my experience, those are markers of clinging to a conclusion and waiting for evidence of it. If I'm off base, help me out here.
I also think you're being forthright with me and not subversive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor...
(BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt).
But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts.
Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out.
If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload.
I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
But in any case, I think you kind of proved the point that if what you say was true, it wasn't generally known.
Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(
Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.
This is wrong. My friend who is a New York City plastic surgeon was pressed into monitoring a floor full of patients on ventilators. Meanwhile in Idaho, the hospitals were full.
I found that the risk of supplying a deadly contagion to a loved one is a risk that mattered to me. Even if my loved one were elderly or burdened with a health issue.
I also realized some concern for the lives of people I didn't love. FF to now and I mask up when I do service calls in medical buildings (because of high risk patients).
1) healthy adults and children were and continue to be killed by covid, even if at lower rates. 2) this is horribly devaluing the lives of people with confounding vulnerabilities. Are you suggesting it's fine if they get decimated or worse? 3) This ignores the long term disabling effects population wide where patients survive but suffer awful quality of life for months or years
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning long covid and eugenics, but I'm fine with that. I've been very disappointed in the shift observed in HN commenter population lately. I used to think this was a group of intelligent & thoughtful people but am no longer suffering that illusion.
It is a fantasy to consider your suggestion as a solution. Even if it were possible, you're condemning those people to a life of isolation and slowly dying alone.
If we instead set & raised indoor air quality standards and established social norms of staying home when sick or masking when that's not possible, then life could go on mostly as normal. But fuck me for asking people for small inconveniences to help others.
I would say it's reasonable to suggest vulnerable folks avoid indoor public dining, but not to remain alone indefinitely.
Anyways, bring on the downvotes.
Acute and specific things we could do to mitigate H5N1 right now, in particular, are deploying the vaccine we have to all poultry and dairy workers to reduce animal to human crossovers.
Which I pointed out is not possible, because those people depend on many other healthy people to care for them. Either those people also need to join the "at risk" bubble (not feasible since they have jobs, school etc) or you don't really have the at risk population isolated as you suggest.
If you don't understand this then you have no idea how care networks function, with duties spread across facility staff, families, volunteers, visiting caregivers etc.
Suggesting you cut off one or more legs of those support networks isn't practical or humane. It would mean people without adequate support for basic needs like feeding, toileting & bathing, leaving aside mental/physical exercise and socialization.
40% of Americans are obese.
This implies you have the means to have every need met at home. It's not the most common scenario.
This response (and a few others here) hints that your concern for well being might not extend much to other people.
This isn't a condemnation. I have HFA relatives who struggle with this limit, particularly those who are especially gifted elsewhere. Demonizing them is wrong.
However, views without empathy might necessarily be downgraded - that is, they may carry less weight where empathy is needed.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't share it, however. My perspective is this.
After several decades of autistic folks being deeply embedded in my life, I've come to view the spectrum as a normalcy that all of us reside on. Our challenges aren't equal but our list of possible factors is.
In that view, HFA is a shorthand we use to indicate someone exhibits enough degrees of enough factors. I see HFA as a pointer to a cluster, not a person.
Two of those factors are a dearth of connection and authenticity. I believe our poster exhibited both. The reason I referenced HFA: It's the term I know that also points to a strong presentation of both of those. If you have a better, I might adopt it.
Regarding a dearth of connection, it's something I'm intimate with. I've managed to develop some empathy but it's like trying to grow a garden without seed, soil, air or sunlight.
But if someone is there, I know they've already brought what they have to the table. I need to adjust my expectations.
On an individual basis, people who survive the pandemic (by avoiding infection or by surviving infection) are tempted to reason that the fear, doubt, and mitigations were all in fact overblown. After all, most folks got through it ok, right?
The reality is that COVID worked out way, way worse than even pessimistic guesses in early 2020. It killed over a million Americans, many of whom were in fact healthy adults without obvious risk factors. And the long-term legacy of “long COVID” impairment is still being learned.
To this day, her and her husband will rant and rave about how dangerous the vaccine is (which my family and I all the boosters for).
I've been told about the millions that will die any day now from the vaccines. And while I've yet to actually hear of a single person that took the vaccine who's died from either covid or the vaccine itself, I have multiple family members and friends family members that I know died from covid.
I don't even doubt that there are people that have received the vaccine and later died from covid, I just don't personally know anyone that is in that category.
it was the imperious attitude that forfeited the credibility of institutions and will weaken another social response, and not the people who wouldn't be lied to. people talked about the unvaccinated as a risk, what about the people who for their eagerness to submit, their fearfulness, and their profound contempt for honesty, failed to be persuasive and credible in a crisis?
some people used a flu to run a society wide milgram experiment and everybody knows now. nobody will listen again.
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Even assuming it was, it would only have been a fraction of a fraction of the risk from age.
Just let them die.
Do not want a ventilator because 80% of those placed in ventilators die? (humans are awful at reasoning)
Great! Die.
Enough with this nonsense.
I have a friend here in Oregon that came down with conjunctivitis for several days and then progressed to flu symptoms. It didn't hit him hard though and he recovered on his own just fine. I'm sure many pathogens can produce this same symptom progression, but it elevated my curiosity for sure.
I see that Canadian teen who acquired H5N1 had a similar symptom progression and initially tested positive for flu strain A, but it wasn't until they did further testing specifically for H5N1 that it was discovered. I suspect these "last-resort" testing scenarios are quite common since most hospitals (particularly in the US) don't give enough of a damn to test further for cases that don't require over-night+ admission into the hospital or ICU.
The fact that this outbreak is happening during typical cold/flu season is part of what has virologists on edge. Both hitting the right person wouldn't be great.
The best defense here is for people to get their flu vaccine and avoid livestock if possible. If not possible, then it's reporting to the USDA/CDC if your livestock gets sick.
Unfortunately, this all may translate into culling of herds which will translate into higher egg/beef prices to the average consumer.
Covid, on the other hand, had few precursors and hit in a population dense area (Wuhan). It does not help that for a fairly significant portion of the population covid was near symptomless.
H5N1 has been much more severe when it hits humans.
That said, it's not impossible that a variant of H5N1 that escapes will do so because it's more covid like in that it doesn't look or act much worse than a common flu in the first few infected.
H5N1 today is a precursor. How would we know whether the strain which finally goes "viral" in humans is a product of "natural" washing or was done in a lab with humanized mouse cells?
Scotts love of Metaculus over other prediction markets blinded him in this years Presidential race and then wrote the most copium filled article titled "Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced" [0] even though Metaculus has the worst calibration of any market [1] which should obviously be true because there's no money on the line (even fake money, see Manifold Markets, helps accuracy).
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-...
Other than people who work with birds & cattle. It'd be really nice to see a campaign to get them immunized for the flu to reduce the risk of a co-infection that can hybridize H5N1.
Here's hoping our cows don't get sick.
1) over the last 20 years H5N1 has spread from birds to minks and cows and in the last few months also to pigs
2) pigs in particular are hosts to both human and bird viruses, so they're a likely place for an H5N1 virus to do the reassortment with a human flu virus that might make it become human to human transmissible
3) but nonetheless, today is still not that much different -- the risk now is only a little elevated from the baseline ~5% risk of some pandemic flu breaking out that we might get in any year
Turns out cramming a lot of animals into ever tiner spaces creates more opportunities for pathogenic recombination and evolution.
We need another term besides "vaccine" for the class of inoculations which don't prevent disease spread but rather lessen the (statistical) occurrence of severe illness. A lot of the focus on "vaccines" for chickens, cows, pigs etc. is on preventing severe illness: preventing serious illness still allows product to be delivered to market (hopefully post illness) whereas preventing disease spread requires a commitment to culling breakthroughs which interferes with profit!
My general understanding that preventing serious illness, rather than transmission, is the objective with current influenza vaccines for humans as well.
(As long as they're not noticeably sick, I'll keep on hugging my chickens as a source of generalized immunity to both coronaviruses and influenza.)
Wait, here's a better one: speculative therapy
Also make it invite only
> Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or alleviate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer).