"…What keeps epidemiologists up at night is a scenario where bird flu gains the ability to spread efficiently among humans. Letting the virus spread widely among animals increases its chances of evolving to do so. And if we do end up in this nightmare scenario, the virus will already have mutated — so there's no way to know if such a variant would be milder, or much more deadly. It's also worth remembering that a virus doesn't need a mortality rate of 50 percent to devastate society. Some scholars estimate that the mortality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic was most likely only around 2 or 3 percent..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/opinion/bird-flu-america-death.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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