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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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This is it popping off. We've already lost a huge portion of chickens in the US. We're seeing dozens of cases in humans. And it's in cows too. The only reason it doesn't feel like a big deal is because we as a nation aren't doing anything about it yet, only individual farms are. Same way COVID went from "is this a big deal?" to "oh fuck shut everything down".
The big event will be someone with regular human flu getting bird flu, giving the virus opportunities to swap DNA segments. If it gets the transmissibility of our standard influenza and the lethality of bird flu, it'll be a rough six months to a year before we have vaccines for it as it rips through our population.
Especially considering flu vaccines are made with eggs, and this disease is currently thoroughly decimating our egg producing livestock.
The lethality is 52%. If it rips through the population, we're looking at total collapse well before the vaccine is available.
Highly dependent on the degree to which it's contagious. But you're right, especially considering we're looking at one of the worst flu seasons in more than a decade currently. If all flu cases were 50% lethal that'd be 10-15 million deaths.