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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Why is it a concern if there’s no symptoms?

We know diseases spread through the population constantly.

There are bird flu variants that are very deadly to humans. It's been a concern of scientists for a long time that it would evolve to spread more easily to and between humans.

if it kills birds but spreads to humans than it has two hosts it can hop between. Most outbreaks that kill their hosts are maladapted. The black plague didn't kill rats, covid didn't kill bats, HIV didn't kill chimps, etc. If you are a virus and you're killing your host at a rapid rate then you are killing yourself.

The only time it can make sense evolutionary to kill your host is when you have multiple host options. This could devastate the poultry industry for far longer than we expected

for a couple reasons:

1) because it can mutate and develop new and different symptoms (c.f., yearly flu)

2) because the lack of testing/symptoms means its more difficult to identify and track (c.f., early covid)

3) because people can be infectious without knowing and pass it along...see 1

4) because no symptoms now doesn't mean it does not cause harm (c.f., HPV and cervical cancer)

The danger with a widely spread asymptomatic infection is that it might become symptomatic, or might be for some portion of the population. Or chickens.

But we already have widespread flus every year — which aren’t asymptomatic.

How does this compare?

Worse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mortality_from_H5N1

If you look up the general topic, the listed ones are endemic strains — ie, the yearly ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic

Being surprised by asymptomatic cases suggests their IFR numbers are high on the page you linked, due to low occurrence and conflation with other colds (or asymptomatic cases).

Is there anything to suggest that the asymptomatic strain detected here is worse?

How is that statistic not severely flawed?

Unless they are performing large scale sampling of the general population, the denominator (cases of confirmed influenza) is potentially much larger in practice.

Moreso because it seems likely that the confirmed cases are sampled from the sickest population seeking treatment.

And this article is further evidence of exactly this, since the "silent infections" here were previously uncounted.

>.< This feels like having COVID arguments again.

We both understand that pandemics don't happen under controlled, fully observable situations, yes?

And therefore must be studied and predicted based on incomplete information?

And this has been the case since the dawn of epidemiology?

No symptoms doesn't imply no side effects.

Furthermore the more viruses you're exposed to, the more likely you'll get one mutated to really hurt you. The best way to deal with viruses is to avoid them to the extent possible.

Sure — but life is a risk tradeoff, ie cost versus benefit. So we should focus our attention on the most dangerous things, not panic over everything.

There’s also contrary examples to your general rule, eg, catching cowpox protected you from smallpox — so you were better off being exposed to the relatively weaker cowpox, even if it wasn’t risk free.

What would you characterize as more dangerous than a threat like this? What are you seeing that you'd characterize as panic?

Enemy tanks rolling along your street. A mandate to stay indoors with food delivery organized by the army and finding out your family is not on the list to get any.

There are a lot of more dangerous threats than another flu virus.

Id say collapse of societal functions in general is what you should worry about (be it pandemics, climate change or rampant egomaniac billionares). Giving it a "government bad" spin at least still implies some form of order, thus is not the worst case and so imo misses your point of "more dangerous things than the flu".

Btw, that erosion of trust in societies, combined with cluelessness and learned helplessness facing known, serious yet solvable issues (like pandemics) esp. in democracies worries me the most.

Sure but i'm many orders of magnitude times more likely to die from a virus than "enemy tanks".

A threat like what?

This particular virus is asymptomatic without known fatalities.

See Typhoid Mary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon?wprov=sfti1

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