Alex Tabarrok remains stunned at how poorly we are responding to the threat from H5N1:
Our poor response to COVID was regrettable but perhaps understandable given the US hadn’t faced a major pandemic in decades. Having been through COVID, however, you would think that we would be primed. But no. Instead of acting aggressively to stop the spread in cows we took a gamble that avian flu would fizzle out. It didn’t.
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The case fatality rate for cows appears to be low but significant, perhaps 2%. A small number of pigs have also been infected. On the other hand, over 100 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been killed or culled.
There have now been 66 cases in humans in the US. Moreover, the CDC reports that in at least one case the virus appears to have evolved within its human host to become more infectious. We don’t know that for sure but it’s not good news. Recall that in theory a single mutation will make the virus much more capable of infecting humans.
When I wrote on December 1 that A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History, Manifold Markets was predicting a 9% probability of greater than 1 million US human cases in 2025. Today the prediction is at 20%.