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Comment by verteu | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too concerned, as it doesn't spread very well from human-to-human (R0 << 1).

The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you. So any level of infection in a species that easily transmits to humans is risky.

> The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you.

Ugh, that's not good. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B a few days later. :( :( :(

Is there more info about that mixing of strains anywhere, as when I was searching for stuff online about that ~2 weeks ago nothing showed up.

You could start from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassortment

Well that's cool. Now I'm going down a rabbit hole of learning the differences between recombination and reassortment.

Thanks, that looks like the right kind of thing. :)

>. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B.

I had flu A one month ago and my daughter had flu B recently (she's had the nose vaccine and had a very mild symptoms). My daughter infected my wife, who also got flu B but I did not get it at all.

It's the same with almost every kind of infection so far (except covid, but even with covid we all got very different symptoms) -- and I'm grateful for it, because all of us being sick at the same time would make it much worse overall.

I read that we are attracted to people who have different imune systems than our own.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is an apt quote here. You understand R values but don't seem to be factoring in mutation rates once a virus jumps species.

There are 8+ billion humans on the planet, and you're not worried about a virus evolving to spread between them?

Is it sarcasm? There were always viruses evolving to spread between humans.

Ones that have been watched closely because of high mortality in birds? Spread globally? And jumped species to different mammals?

Dismissing H5N1 out of hand is like saying we shouldn't be concerned if Ebola Reston showed up worldwide, in multiple species, because it's not known to infect humans.

H5N1 already has a lot of characteristics that would make it very concerning if it also became human to human transmissible. Ergo, we should take it seriously.

I'm not arguing about the properties of the virus. I'm arguing against the need to worry.

The properties of the virus (current strain) are the defining difference between need-to-worry and not-worry.

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