The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    10·
    5 days ago

    Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.

    This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn’t ever spread to epidemic proportions because it’s super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      This only matters if it incapacitates the host quickly enough that they don’t spread it, which isn’t necessarily closely related to its deadliness. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence, but that didn’t make HIV less transmissible.