Typhoid famously caused silent infections in some people, so no, not necessarily. Just because it's asymptomatic for the original infected doesn't mean it'll stay that way if they transmit it to others.
Plus one of the most common ways for a zoonotic strain of a disease to become human-transmissible is to end up mixing around in the same body as an existing human-transmissible strain of that disease.
One of the better strategies in that game was to spend all you points on mutations that improve contagiousness and minimizing "scary symptoms" (like haemorrhaging from the eyes) early on, and then ramping those up later on so you kill everyone before scientists can complete their research into a cure. Research only started when your plague became disruptive.
Many viruses are linked to cancers, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, T1D and so on. Research is finding that some of these viruses may actually be low grade infections or left over viral proteins causing constant immune dysfunction.
People who claimed they never got SARS-CoV-2 for example were tested with a novel ultra sensitive single molecule assay and found that 99.9% of individuals samples were indeed asymptomatically infected.
Here’s an earlier version of this claim showing 95%.
Some of these individuals later went on to develop Long COVID. They are using this assay in an antiviral trial to see if it reduces the amount of SCV2 proteins this assay can detect.
There are bird flu variants that are very deadly to humans. It's been a concern of scientists for a long time that it would evolve to spread more easily to and between humans.
if it kills birds but spreads to humans than it has two hosts it can hop between. Most outbreaks that kill their hosts are maladapted. The black plague didn't kill rats, covid didn't kill bats, HIV didn't kill chimps, etc. If you are a virus and you're killing your host at a rapid rate then you are killing yourself.
The only time it can make sense evolutionary to kill your host is when you have multiple host options. This could devastate the poultry industry for far longer than we expected
The danger with a widely spread asymptomatic infection is that it might become symptomatic, or might be for some portion of the population. Or chickens.
Unless they are performing large scale sampling of the general population, the denominator (cases of confirmed influenza) is potentially much larger in practice.
Moreso because it seems likely that the confirmed cases are sampled from the sickest population seeking treatment.
And this article is further evidence of exactly this, since the "silent infections" here were previously uncounted.
Being surprised by asymptomatic cases suggests their IFR numbers are high on the page you linked, due to low occurrence and conflation with other colds (or asymptomatic cases).
Is there anything to suggest that the asymptomatic strain detected here is worse?
Furthermore the more viruses you're exposed to, the more likely you'll get one mutated to really hurt you. The best way to deal with viruses is to avoid them to the extent possible.
Sure — but life is a risk tradeoff, ie cost versus benefit. So we should focus our attention on the most dangerous things, not panic over everything.
There’s also contrary examples to your general rule, eg, catching cowpox protected you from smallpox — so you were better off being exposed to the relatively weaker cowpox, even if it wasn’t risk free.
Enemy tanks rolling along your street.
A mandate to stay indoors with food delivery organized by the army and finding out your family is not on the list to get any.
There are a lot of more dangerous threats than another flu virus.
Id say collapse of societal functions in general is what you should worry about (be it pandemics, climate change or rampant egomaniac billionares). Giving it a "government bad" spin at least still implies some form of order, thus is not the worst case and so imo misses your point of "more dangerous things than the flu".
Btw, that erosion of trust in societies, combined with cluelessness and learned helplessness facing known, serious yet solvable issues (like pandemics) esp. in democracies worries me the most.
Also expected. I've said for a while the mortality of this virus is inflated because we're not mass testing for it and weren't detecting the asymptomatic cases. Or even the symptomatic-but-not-serious ones that people get over on their own.
No way to know how much it's been inflated until we find more of these, though.
The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you. So any level of infection in a species that easily transmits to humans is risky.
> The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you.
Ugh, that's not good. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B a few days later. :( :( :(
Is there more info about that mixing of strains anywhere, as when I was searching for stuff online about that ~2 weeks ago nothing showed up.
>. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B.
I had flu A one month ago and my daughter had flu B recently (she's had the nose vaccine and had a very mild symptoms). My daughter infected my wife, who also got flu B but I did not get it at all.
It's the same with almost every kind of infection so far (except covid, but even with covid we all got very different symptoms) -- and I'm grateful for it, because all of us being sick at the same time would make it much worse overall.
I read that we are attracted to people who have different imune systems than our own.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is an apt quote here. You understand R values but don't seem to be factoring in mutation rates once a virus jumps species.
Ones that have been watched closely because of high mortality in birds? Spread globally? And jumped species to different mammals?
Dismissing H5N1 out of hand is like saying we shouldn't be concerned if Ebola Reston showed up worldwide, in multiple species, because it's not known to infect humans.
H5N1 already has a lot of characteristics that would make it very concerning if it also became human to human transmissible. Ergo, we should take it seriously.
I think you are not understanding how difficult it is for people with types of phobias about germs and illness.
Imagine being obsessive compulsive about cleanliness and germs, then the pandemic comes along. You would never recover from that experience psychologically.
It would be worse than if someone with ophidiophobia woke up one day and snakes were randomly falling from the sky.
The worst of all though is an infection with no symptoms. Like an invisible prison the germ freak can never escape from.
What is bizarre is we pretend there aren't at least hundreds of thousands of people in the country with these type of phobias.
Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.
This ceaseless hyperventilation over the flu is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.
I assume you're referring to old people when you say 'vulnerable populations', but the problem is that old people are not always the only ones that get affected during flu pandemics. During the Spanish flu pandemic, for example, half the deaths were in people 20 to 40 years old.
Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.
This ceaseless hyperventilation over covid-19 is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.
Non-sarcastic agreement here. It was way overblown because were were restricting the tests to people we were already pretty sure had it through contact, massively inflating the mortality rate those first few months.
It's not clear what you're saying. That COVID was overblown because of how we tested for it?
Let's pretend COVID didn't exist. Yet, let's also look at all-cause mortality (CDC data). Death rates approached twice normal. Certainly looks like "something" was happening!
Those elevated death rates were only for about two months. Also the better metric would be years-of-life-lost from a societal perspective. It'd be unfortunate but much less impactful on society if the excess deaths were 76 year olds with only a year or two of life left than if 20 year olds were dying at that rate.
Also there were a few surveys by the BBC and other news organizations during that time which showed that a majority of people thought the death rates were 1/10.
The age adjusted death rates show the 2021 rates were about the same as the year 2006 [1].
At the start the media flat out lied about covid mortality rates to scare people into compliance, using the case fatality rate instead of the infection fatality rate (the former is much higher because only more serious cases end up in hospital, so there's a selection bias, especially when many cases are asymptomatic). It also ignored the age-stratified nature of risk, which the data showed really early on, quoting the mortality rate for 80 year olds as if it applied to everyone, when in fact the mortality rate decreased roughly 10x for every 10 years of age below 80.
The global IFR is around 0.6%. And a complex mix of persistent COVID sequelae - including cognitive decline, heart disease, severe chronic fatigue, and reduced immunity - are happening in around 10% of those infected, at all ages.
The big problem with bird flu - actually any flu - is that even if people don't die they can be off sick for a couple of weeks.
And if you have tens of millions off sick for a couple of weeks at the same time, everything stops working.
The global IFR was claimed to be around 3% and CFR around 10% in early 2020 because of how the tests were restricted, artificially reducing the denominator. I think serious side-effects were claimed around 40-50% as well, but not sure I'm remembering that one right. It was never actually that high, but most people had no idea what was actually going on and it caused all sorts of panic which led to the lockdowns.
It's one of these green states.
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/wwd-h5.html