China reports human case of H3N8 bird flu (opens in new tab)

Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.

The difference with Ebola though is just how insanely bad it is - I cannot think of a virus I would NOT want more than Ebola.

Thankfully the fact it is so damn destructive also means it is harder to spread en masse.....

>sexually active

I think you meant "promiscuous".

One possible reason for delayed virus detection in the West is our sluggish response to identifying new strains (in some of our largest countries, not all). But I think the emergence and spread of serious viral infections is largely influenced by population density, rather than geographical location. And the population density in China has gone up a lot in about the last decade, making more serious transmissible diseases come out of China recently.

When Covid's first wave saw exponential infection growth, statistics and graphs demonstrated striking similarities among urban areas worldwide. In contrast, rural regions consistently exhibited lower infection rates throughout the pandemic.

To illustrate this with a personal anecdote, I know someone who lives in a tiny village on a ranch (population: ~30), and they have reported seeing zero Covid cases, having interacted with around 50 other people over the last four years. I think this underscores the role of population density in virus transmission.

When I visited South China, everything was crowded. Sick building syndrome is probably more common due to the common use of AC and large shopping malls people hang out at as well as recirculating air. My friend in India said that she did not get constant electricity in Gujarat so AC wasn't as common everywhere.

Don't forget sheer number of people.

The viral jump from animals to humans is a common mechanism in many of the worst pandemics, with covid-19 and hiv being prime recent examples. There's some evidence "the spanish flu" of 1918 came from swine.

If I were working on the problem "how can we reduce the frequency new very dangerous viruses are introduced" I would pay attention to this aspect.

The sheer size and population of China?

And you'd trust the news out of ... where, exactly?

I think it's pretty clear from the last decade that the major journalism providers in the US (for example) are also corrupt, and that's true of every country I've experienced.

Which is not to say that everywhere suffers this problem to the same degree, but just that the notion of a "trusted source of news" is demonstrably naive.

No you can't, but if they were locking down cities, we'd know about it.

... anymore?

Same for American news

Most bird flu in the past only spreads from birds to humans, or is like MERS in that it can technically spread human to human but with an R0 far less than 1.

> mucous membranes

Depends on which membranes. I think I remember reading that the reason these can transfer bird-to-human but not human-to-human is that they can only infect us if it gets so deep into the lungs we can't actually expel it from breathing or coughing.

My understanding is that most bird flu variants that spreads from birds to humans does not also spread from humans to humans.

We don't catch bird flu from eating infected birds, we catch it from being exposed to live birds who are sick (or to their droppings, as I understand it).

Do you get bird flu from eating birds?

That doesn't make sense.

Does anyone eat raw birds?

Wouldn't you just get it from being around birds?

The position known since the Kama Sutra as the Aztec Sacrifice. However, in the next edition it will be renamed the "Praying Mantis" in order to be less offensive.

Hey, don't yuck their yum.

In case anyone is curious, it appears the location in question had three months of "stay at home", over a year of other restrictions (including school closures), 625 days of broad mask requirements, and so forth. In fact, some mask requirements are still in effect today.

Eh, put it on the tab. Millennials have never known stability anyways, they'd probably get uncomfortable if their lives stopped staggering from one externally-imposed crisis to another.

I used to live in Brisbane which had two "one in 100 year" floods in relatively quick succession: 2011 and 2022. When the second one came there was some talk about communicating the risk more effectively. Instead of saying "one in 100 year" it would be better to say there is like, a 0.2% chance of major flooding every year.

An unprecedented number of unprecedented, once in a lifetime events.

Which one was the second one? I'm assuming the first and third are the Great Recession and Covid.

It's like when I got bored playing SimCity and would just trigger all of the disasters.

Lifetimes are getting longer.

California hasn't fallen into the sea as many predicted so we have still more to look forward to

Fourth?