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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   915 thread views

Transnational Thursday for October 31, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Out of all these things, I'm most worried about H5N1 over the short and mid term.

If it transmits between pigs (soon will, I assume) rather than just infecting one here and there, I'm led to believe the road to a human to human transmitting virus pandemic is a short one...

I think I'm mostly focused on terrible outliers, and the mortality for H5N1 just doesn't seem that high. Say 0.05x to 3x covid, something in that range. You then have to add long-term effects, which are hard to estimate &c, but it just doesn't seem very existentially threatening.

Depends on the variant and how it mutates. If it becomes an easily transmissible virus that attacks the lungs it could get much worse than covid. Ferrets, who are quite similar to humans as far as respiratory system goes, afaik, have a terrible death rate to h5n1.

Yeah I think the medical side of things are most worried about the flu side of things. Monkeypox doesn't excite me, Myco isn't a big deal.

A Kessler cascade is one of my biggest fears though, yikes.

Why doesn't monkeypox excite you? It could fill in the niche that smallpox previously had.

Yeah. That's one of my fears too. The more trash we put into orbit, the higher the risk goes of making the satellite space unviable forever.

Boeing keeps winning.

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