As likely as any other flu, which is basically guaranteed. I doubt it will become a 2020-style shutdown though, purely because that would be unpopular
It’s not “basically guaranteed”. H5N1 has been around for a while and was never really considered a serious threat before.
And a 2020-style shutdown would be the least of everyone’s worries if this thing does blow up. The fatality rates in humans is around 40% or so. At that rate, you’re talking about at the very least a complete breakdown of society as we know it, if not a full-blown extinction-level event.
Early COVID variants were more fatal than later ones even before accounting for resistances; we might reasonably expect that the variant that does breakthrough will be less deadly, if only because an extremely deadly virus tends to incapacitate the people who would otherwise be spreading it
Does anyone have an opinion as to how likely this is to eventually turn into a pandemic?
As likely as any other flu, which is basically guaranteed. I doubt it will become a 2020-style shutdown though, purely because that would be unpopular
It’s not “basically guaranteed”. H5N1 has been around for a while and was never really considered a serious threat before.
And a 2020-style shutdown would be the least of everyone’s worries if this thing does blow up. The fatality rates in humans is around 40% or so. At that rate, you’re talking about at the very least a complete breakdown of society as we know it, if not a full-blown extinction-level event.
Isn’t it way more deadly than covid? Maybe that’ll be reason enough to scare idiots into compliance?
Early COVID variants were more fatal than later ones even before accounting for resistances; we might reasonably expect that the variant that does breakthrough will be less deadly, if only because an extremely deadly virus tends to incapacitate the people who would otherwise be spreading it