Should we be concerned about the current H5N1 outbreak?

Question

I&rsquo;ve seen chatter about this pick up in the past sleepless, but I&rsquo;m struggling to discern whether it&rsquo;s just clickbait or not.Lots of stories about mammal transmission, mink farm outbreaks and one human case in South America.

ipsum2 · Accepted Answer

Most media outlets downplayed COVID in early 2020. Now they've over-corrected and report on every minor outbreak and stoking fears for views and ad revenue.

mach1ne · Answer

No. It's not viral in the sense COVID is. Minor epidemics around the world are possible but not anything really serious.

ricardobayes · Answer

We should really stop keeping animals in such high density. We should realize this practice is dangerous to us.

twoWhlsGud · Answer

Maybe? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pan...

slackfan · Answer

Get scared and depressed and doomscroll and watch the news more so we can sell you more stuff. Yes.

kkfx · Answer

No, BUT we MUST be concerned by the new-old-classic https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198

sublinear · Answer

It's just like when you enable poorly implemented static analysis vulnerability scanning and the underlying pedantic linter rules start triggering thousands of false positives.I am worried about egg prices though. /s

ideamotor · Answer

What are expecting by asking a bunch of random people on here?
The pedantic taking things literally response? “Well you should not worry because that does not help”.
The axe to grind response? “Who cares because climate change will doom us all.”
The psychopathic dissociative response? “None of this matters because the earth will heal itself.”
The non-expert expert? “Yes/No.”
Oh I’m sure you’ll get some valuable guidance on interpreting the news here.

petodo · Answer

I was not concerned about COVID, I was concerned about authoritarian politicians introducing meaningless restrictions which should have no place in democracy and I was disgusted by majority of population which had no problem with them, I expected bigger disagreement despite having already very low meaning about society in general.I'm even less concerned about bird flu, but I'd be much more concerned about fascist politicians and their fascist supporters since it seems majority of society has no problem with fascism.