[HN Gopher] America's first bird flu death reported in Louisiana
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America's first bird flu death reported in Louisiana
Author : bikenaga
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-01-06 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| biofox wrote:
| This is concerning, but not worth panicking about yet. The person
| had direct contact with infected birds, so there is no evidence
| of human-to-human transmission.
|
| For those wanting to learn more about bird flu, and flu in
| general, I highly recommend the recent Scott Alexander post:
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wan...
|
| [Edited for clarity]
| krunck wrote:
| Thanks. Excellent article.
|
| This made me laugh: "If reassortment is sort of like viral sex,
| pigs are sort of like Tinder."
| xmddmx wrote:
| The person who got infected in Canada came very close to dying.
| They were on ECMO for a while.
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2415890
| timr wrote:
| > 13-year-old girl with a history of mild asthma and an
| elevated body-mass index of greater than 35
|
| Essential context. That's the equivalent of a 5'4" (163cm)
| woman at >=205 lbs (93kg).
| locopati wrote:
| Maybe not worth panicking about, but given LA official attitude
| towards vaccines [1] which is likely mirrored by other
| Republican run states, it's only a matter of time before
| there's an outbreak of some transmissible disease.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-
| news/2024/12/20/nx...
| wmf wrote:
| There's already a (regular) flu outbreak in Louisiana and
| people are probably dying from it but it's not considered
| newsworthy because people die from flu every year.
| timr wrote:
| Please don't speculate. We know what serotypes are
| circulating in humans, and they're not this type.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting
| COVID_, flu _and mpox shots_ "
|
| I've [vouch]ed for this flagged comment because it seems
| clearly on topic. (?)
| NewJazz wrote:
| This is something to worry about if you have a backyard flock.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there a large non-worried population posting from
| somewhere without access to, uh, the sky?
| timr wrote:
| > But even if the actual case fatality rate were 10 times lower -
| about 5% - it would still be a serious virus to contend with. The
| case fatality rate for the ancestral strain of Covid-19 was
| estimated to be around 2.6%, for example.
|
| Ugh. The news media never learns [1]:
|
| 1) The _IFR_ for Covid-19 was not 2.6%. Less than a tenth of
| that, actually (yes, even for the ancestral strains).
|
| 2) "CFR" is a made up number, because it depends on what cases
| you count. If you count only a sample of people in the ICU, you
| can make the CFR look horrible for pretty much any illness. We
| made this mistake during covid!
|
| 3) You _can see the same mistake in progress here_ , because you
| can't just take this sample of _deaths you looked for_ , divide
| it by the _cases you know about_ , scale it down by a random
| factor (that you pulled out of your butt), and then panic about
| the result [2].
|
| [1] or more likely: never _wants_ to learn, because fear drives
| clicks.
|
| [2] for those who wonder: the right way to do this is random
| sampling -- you at least have to sample the population randomly
| to estimate seroprevalence correctly.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" for those who wonder: the right way to do this is random
| sampling -- you at least have to sample the population randomly
| to estimate seroprevalence correctly"_
|
| There was a recent experiment that found 7% antibody prevalence
| in US diary workers,
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7344a3.htm
| sampo wrote:
| > The IFR for Covid-19 was not 2.6%. Less than a tenth of that,
| actually
|
| If we take the number of Covid deaths for, for example New
| Jersey (the whole state) or New York City from Wikipedia as:
| 26,795 [1] and 40,000 [2] and divide by the total population
| (9.5M and 8.8M), we get IFR estimates of 0.28% and 0.51% for NJ
| and NYC.
|
| [1] "As of January 11, 2022, 1.63 million cases were confirmed
| in the state, incurring 26,795 deaths."
|
| [2] "As of August 19, 2023 the city's confirmed COVID-19 deaths
| exceeded 45,000 and probable deaths exceeded 5,500."
| leotravis10 wrote:
| Another pandemic is surely coming as the US has already lost
| control. It'll get ugly real fast with no safeguards whatsoever.
|
| https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattl...
| hall0ween wrote:
| Geez
| pottertheotter wrote:
| I don't know if this will help anyone, but my sister is an expert
| in this area. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a
| couple decades of experience. She was the head of vaccine-
| preventable epidemiology for one of the states in the U.S., and
| is now the head of epidemiology data and informatics for that
| state.
|
| Over the holidays, I was asking her about bird flu because some
| of the things I was reading were frightening, but I wasn't sure
| what to make of them.
|
| When I showed her this paper that is linked to in another comment
| here https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2415890, she
| responded with this:
|
| Everyone will react differently to the flu. There are kids in her
| exact situation that have that kind of reaction to the normal
| flu. However, it is still concerning. If the virus does cause
| more severe illness overall and it does mutate to become person-
| to-person, we are in trouble.
|
| That is the hardest thing about public health--you just don't
| know which way things will swing. So you are always on the edge
| of either overreacting or underreacting.
| dbish wrote:
| What did your sister say before the last pandemic?
| ruthmarx wrote:
| Time to invest in bleach shares.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Im not worried since this one wasnt created in a lab. Only half
| joking.
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