It’s interesting to compare this to the beginning of the Covid pandemic. We’ve been able to pretty effectively track H5N1 as it hops between animal populations and some humans, whereas Covid came out of nowhere.
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?
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.