DON’T HAVE TO WEAPONIZE IT. THE BIRDS ARE DOING THAT FOR US” I had the nasty flu

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alarm-as-dutch-lab-creates-highly-contagious-killer-flu-6279474.html”WE DON’T HAVE TO WEAPONIZE IT. THE BIRDS ARE DOING THAT FOR US”

I had the nasty flu that killed so many people back in 1977, and my health has never fully recovered. I don’t know if the conspiracy nuts are right or wrong in suggesting that the Swine Flu escaped the lab. But either way it wasn’t very fun.

I also got the flu that killed a few hundred people in Europe in the winter of 1996-1997. (It made for an interesting vacation. I soldiered onward anyway. I lost 25 pounds because of it.)

H5N1 (the bird flu) only has an R0 (reproductive rate) of 1.14+. But it had a 60% mortality rate. (They call it ‘morbidity rate’ in the literature.) The relatively low rate of transmission was due to the fact that you had to be in pretty close contact to get it. I’ve seen a few other studies where the measured reproductive rate reached over 2.0 (although they were smaller samples.) The common flu we get every year seems to come in at around 2.

But these researchers have bred an aerosol variant (one that can be spread by sneezing for example). And sure, the really scary diseases have R0’s of 5 to 15. But let’s just say that that we go from 1.14 to 1.6, to something like 2.2 to 4.

I mean, Soderberg’s movie is scary enough as it is.