Sigh, you know things aren’t going well when I post a rare “Plugging the Gap,” my pandemic-themed newsletter. But here we are.
You would think that it being just four years since we had a once-in-a-century global pandemic that left millions dead, billions in months-long lockdowns, trillions in lost income and a generation under-educated with a US government so apparently lost that the President was speculating on how you might use bleach to fix the whole thing that some significant effort might have been undertaken to stop it all happening again. But according to Zeynep Tufekci, writing in the New York Times, apparently not.
So far there is only one confirmed human case. Rick Bright, an expert on the H5N1 virus who served on President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, told me this is the crucial moment. “There’s a fine line between one person and 10 people with H5N1,” he said. “By the time we’ve detected 10, it’s probably too late” to contain.
That’s when I told him what I’d heard from Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner for agriculture. He said he strongly suspected that the outbreak dated back to at least February. The commissioner speculated that back then, as much as 40 percent of the herds in the Texas Panhandle may have been infected.
Dr. Bright fell silent, then asked a very reasonable question: “Doesn’t anyone keep tabs on this?”
The H5N1 outbreak, already a devastating crisis for cattle farmers and their herds, has the potential to turn into an enormous tragedy for the rest of us. But having spent the past two weeks trying to get answers from our nation’s public health authorities, I’m shocked by how little they seem to know about what’s actually going on and how little of what they do know is being shared in a timely manner.
Well, isn’t this just peachy? What we have is significant bovine spread (and I use ‘bovine’ rather than ‘cow,’ so I sound more medically) across many US states. We have H5N1 in the milk. We have jumps in wastewater measurements of some sort of flu (they can’t actually tell which type) in cattle-raising states. And we have one person who contracted H5N1.
When you read the media about this, they talk about there being good news and bad news. The bad news is that the avian flu has jumped from birds (specifically chickens) to cows, from cows to other cows, and from a person. The good news is that it isn’t going from person to person, and the pigs are currently fine. But that isn’t actually good news at all! All of the news is bad because the probability that it jumps from person to person has been getting higher with each piece of bad news.
All this would be nothing to worry about except, according to Tufekci, the US government is not on this. It is still in the hands of local and state health authorities even though it is surely a national outbreak. If you thought that the entire might of the government would be marshalled to ensure person-to-person transmission never happens, you’d be wrong. And if person-to-person transmission happens, containment is over, and we are potentially in a big, fat mess … again.
I don’t know if this could be as bad as COVID-19. No one knows. There are some good vaccine candidates that might be able to be deployed quickly, but if we learned anything from COVID-19, it is that vaccination is, at best, a later mitigation. So much damage can be done before then.
I came out of the pandemic with just one lesson: know as much as possible as quickly as possible. Information is everything. Moreover, gathering information is so cheap relative to the consequences of not doing so. But what the last month or so seems to indicate is that there are no front-line informational resources on this anywhere near commensurate with the level of potential harm.
Why am I telling you all this? There isn’t reason to worry yet, but you should update your beliefs regarding whether governments will be able to control this. I mean, you could stock up on toilet paper (it’s a durable good, and unless you are very pessimistic, you’ll probably make use of it). You could also spend time thinking about what would happen if the pandemic hits the US in the fall during the final stages of a presidential election if you don’t feel the world is giving you enough dire scenarios to think about. Or you can do what I am trying to achieve here and mark this newsletter as read, and remember that Joshua mentioned the whole H5N1 thing in April should things go south.
If you want to read more from people who know things …
