While the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t an experience anyone wants to repeat, infections disease experts like [Dr. Pardis Sabeti] are looking at what we can do to prepare for the next one.
While the next pandemic could potentially be anything, there are a few high profile candidates, and bird flu (H5N1) is at the top of the list. With birds all over the world carrying the infection and the prevalence in poultry and now dairy agriculture operations, the possibility for cross-species infection is higher than for most other diseases out there, particularly anything with an up to 60% fatality rate. Only one of the 70 people in the US who have contracted H5N1 recently have died, and exposures have been mostly in dairy and poultry workers. Scientists have yet to determine why cases in the US have been less severe.
To prevent an H5N1 pandemic before it reaches the level of COVID and ensure its reach is limited like earlier bird and swine flu variants, contact tracing of humans and cattle as well as offering existing H5N1 vaccines to vulnerable populations like those poultry and dairy workers would be a good first line of defense. So far, it doesn’t seem transmissible human-to-human, but more and more cases increase the likelihood it could gain this mutation. Keeping current cases from increasing, improving our science outreach, and continuing to fund scientists working on this disease are our best bets to keep it from taking off like a meme stock.
Whatever the next pandemic turns out to be, smartwatches could help flatten the curve and surely hackers will rise to the occasion to fill in the gaps where traditional infrastructure fails again.
We did a terrible job with the Covid pandemic, especially since people think its over when it isn’t and the World Health Organisation still call it a pandemic. We just swept it under the rug along with all the Long Covid sufferers. You can still catch Covid and die, you have quite a concerningly high chance of developing Long Covid after every Covid infection, and you average 2 of those a year. I do find talking about a current event like its historical while talking about how well we will treat a future pandemic as somewhat ironic.
It’s not longer has public health emergency status.
Eradication was never likely.
we have to balance many fears at once. unfortunately we can’t get perfect safety. we can’t even really defeat a single hazard. so yeah covid goes on, and so do we.
Just like other flus and Pneumonia, covid is here to stay. That’s life. Like the flu, most of us had it, move on.
It’s no longer a pandemic, it’s endemic, we have to live with it now.
Who’s “we”? New Zealand and Norway did a great job to protect their citizens. The US and Sweden, not so much.
Get all one’s shots while insurance is still paying for it.
Or not. Should be up to individual, not the government. That was what was wrong with the Covid flu. A balance is needed. Life is a risk, deal with it – don’t whine about it.
By getting vaccinated you help reduce the spread and severity of the disease. This is especially important for protecting others in society who can’t take the vaccine due to age, medical conditions, immunocompromised, etc.
I see that you might want to choose to be unvaccinated, but you should acknowledge other people’s rights to shun you.
Fortunately for you, smarter, caring people vaccinated you against childhood diseases when you were very young.
that is the exact attitude that brought back measles. Darwin in action. Nice.
Or live in a country with public healthcare.
In general you should take fatality rates with a huge grain of salt. There are a lot of confounding factors. Obviously there is every chance that the disease will mutate significantly before you are ever at risk of picking it up. In addition people who are early victims, are often, nearly by definition immunocompromised and thus more likely to die from it. These early victims are often getting a very ineffective-at-compromising humans version of the virus, so to even be susceptible the victims often need weak immune systems. Then you have to account for the demographics of the early victims. People who work in poultry farms or with cows in close proximity, especially in developing countries, are often not the healthiest or wealthiest. This can contribute to their susceptibility as well as their ability / willingness to seek medical aide until it is too late.
I’m not even going to seriously address the absurd and Orwellian nonsense around giving governments the capacity to track your every movement at all times.
How about we take your comments with a huge grain of salt? Unless you have done a huge amount of research and experimentation, and published your results in a widely-published, peer-reviewed medical journal.
Also, your government already has the capacity to track your every movement at all times.
We know how viruses work. We know how vaccines work. Initially we didn’t know the specifics about how Covid worked, and how it could be confounded. But, we figured it out, and millions of people are still alive today because of the vaccine. Luckily for you, you are one of them. Unluckily for us, you learned how to post nonsense on the internet. Assuming you’re not a bot, of course, stirring up discontent.
Confounding factors or not, the excess deaths during the COVID years are unmistakeable. Estimates are in the 10-20 million range over two years. Yeah, that’s a factor of two, so yeah, there is a confidence interval. But the confidence interval starts at 10 million excess deaths.
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess-deaths-were-associated-with-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-2020-and-2021 Frinstance.
And that’s with all of the precautions / quarantines / etc that people and nations took. Without, it would have certainly been worse.
You can argue about what steps would have been reasonable, personally or as a globe, to save 15 million lives. Or 10 million or 20 million, plus salt. But that is the magnitude that the pandemic took on. It’s hard even to comprehend, honestly.
I like science. In my world science is empirical and results can always be repeated. Some examples, 1 volt through 1 ohm flows 1 amp of current, 10 volts through 10 ohms flows 1 amp of current, 1 BTU will raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree F., Only so many conductors are allowed in half inch conduit, 1 ton of cooling requires 400 CFM of airflow. Medical science is not science and delves more into witchcraft or something of that nature. Create a new drug, test it on 100 persons, It cures 78, does nothing to 13, and kills 9. Side effects include it make the noses fall off some people, It causes some peoples taint to get infected, and it may cause strokes. What a great success now sell it to the plebes. In my world that is not science. I think the scamdemic that was covid opened my eyes to this phenomona even more because the Gov’t kept saying “follow the science” and then changed the recommendation every so often.
“Medical science is not science…” Whoever convinced you of that is your enemy. Seriously.
we all agree. But that’s not applicable here. The covid vaccines didn’t directly cause harm, and greatly reduced severity in the 20% prone to infection, and cause a sore arm at worst in most people. Yes 1 million got sick and died, but that number much lower (about10x) than the rate before the vaccine.
Sweet Mother of Sagan these comments are a (sadly quite predictable) utter mess of conspiracy theories.
Worth remembering that, even by the CDC’s worst-case estimates (as of Sept 2020), the IFR was very low for the younger segments of the population:
0-19yrs: 0.003%
20-49yrs: 0.02%
50-69yrs: 0.5%
70+yrs: 5.4%
https://archive.is/edmyC
And, if you remove those without co-morbidities, the younger segments of population are statistically insignificant (May 2020):
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/predicted-covid-19-fatality-rates-based-age-sex-comorbidities-and-health-system-capacity.pdf
Also worth remembering that, in the US (and many other countries) deaths caused by clearly extraneous factors (e.g. a car crash) were still classified as SARS-CoV-2 deaths at that point in time if there was measured infection. So, the real figures would likely be lower.
This reads like a dressed-up-in-citations version of the second and third lines of the narcissist’s praye: And if it did, it wasn’t that bad; And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
No matter how you slice it, excess deaths for those years were enormously up, and just because a person has a comorbidity doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to die. Honestly, your whole comment feels like a giant exercise in the Just World Fallacy.
It is no conspiracy theory that the state is rubbish at everything, yet 99% of the population somehow expects them to have all the answers and to be able to fix it all.
“the state is rubbish at everything”
What millionaire in the teevee was paid by what billionaire to convince you of that (and also that lowering THEIR taxes will be good for YOU, somehow, what a crazy coincidence).
The idea that governments are inherently incompetent is propaganda created to get people to vote against their own interests and allow profit -motivated people to buy public resources/institutions and sell their services back to us at higher price and lower quality.
Seriously, just use some common sense. If this “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” bogeymen nonsense was true, we’d have at least a few examples of nations where they severely pared down government and it led to improved outcomes. We do not.
It’s also just SUCH a transparent con.
Yeah, I had hoped that HAD would be immune to this nonsense, but they’ve all come crawling out of the woodwork to resist the awful notion that we should organize to minimize the impact of a disease.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis
Crystallizes my intuition on the phenomenon.
The Great Spillover Hoax
27 Apr 2025
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-spillover-hoax/
For many years, there has been an emerging orthodoxy in epidemiological circles that viruses are jumping from animals to humans at a growing rate. That’s the key assertion, the core claim, the one that is rarely challenged.
They cite many papers in the literature but looking at them further, we find only models, assertions, claims rooted in testing bias, and many other sketchy claims.
What I found was a fog machine.
Could my random googling based on no training at all in biochemistry or epidemiology be wrong?
No, it’s the hundreds of highly educated scientists working on these problems every day who are wrong.
-Armin Tamzarian (paraphrased(
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
-Isaac Asimov
Be that as it may, but a universe where Dr. Fauci gets to say “I AM science!” without being mocked out of town is a universe where skepticism is the order of the day.
These days, bioweapons can be developed by most any intelligent person using CRISPR. That’s the actual reason for all of the gain-of-function research, preparing for that, but it’s dual use and can also be used to develop weapons. Since lab leaks are EXTREMELY common, the supposed preparation for a pandemic can CAUSE one. Sound familiar?
Laboratory Escapes and “Self-fulfilling prophecy” Epidemics
By: Martin Furmanski MD
Scientist’s Working Group on Chemical and Biologic Weapons
Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation
February 17, 2014
Introduction
The danger to world or regional public health from the escape from microbiology laboratories of pathogens capable of causing pandemics, or Potentially Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs) has been the subject of considerable discussion including mathematical modeling of the probability and impact of such escapes. The risk of such releases has generally been determined from estimates of laboratory infections that are often incomplete, except for the recent 2013 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report, which is a significant source of recent data on escapes from undetected and unreported laboratory-acquired infections (LAIs).
This paper presents an historical review of outbreaks of PPPs or similarly transmissible pathogens that occurred from presumably well-funded and supervised nationally supported laboratories. It should be emphasized that these examples are only the “tip of the iceberg” because they represent laboratory accidents that have actually caused illness outside of the laboratory in the general public environment. The list of laboratory workers who have contracted potentially contagious infections in microbiology labs but did not start community outbreaks is much, much longer. The examples here are not “near misses;” these escapes caused real-world outbreaks.
Forgot the link:
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Escaped-Viruses-final-2-17-14-copy.pdf
” Since lab leaks are EXTREMELY common, the supposed preparation for a pandemic can CAUSE one.”
Well that’s why the clever folks in the west place their laboratories doing that research ‘outside the environment’ in Africa and China and Ukraine. And if it is about to go wrong you get the hell out of Dodge.
Then claim the locals did it by having sex with monkeys or eating the wrong food.
It’s all so beautifully arranged, and yet some people complain.
As the (still ongoing) public scandal with the insulin in the US shows, we are woefully unprepared for anything substantial. Insulin pricing is still in the wazoo, and the local organized ***** aka “Congress Lobby” still does not allow importing non-US-made stuffs (meaning, not paying legalized bribe to the organized *****) in any substantial quantities truly needed. Oddity has it, the original insulin patent was made public by the inventor, so that ordinary people can afford insulin.