• Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    At the moment it has a pretty low (~0) person to person infection rate.
    But, it does have a 56% mortality rate (Covid was between 3%-5%) so I don’t think we should be fucking around with our response to it.
    Viruses can mutate and that R value (person to person transmission rate) can shoot up after a mutation.
    I would much rather us have an “overblown” response than an inadequate response like we did with Covid. .

    • hellofriend@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Higher mortality rate generally means lower transmission since the infected don’t live long enough to pass it along. If it mutates to be less fatal then I’ll be more worried.

      • hglman@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        They tend to correlate but a virus can easily be both deadly and transmissive. R value is really the only thing to watch here, until a large population is sick we don’t really know the impact anyways.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        In most species, bird flu is both highly infectious and very deadly. A disease being very infectious can make up for its lethality