Epistemic status: a few people without any particular expertise in epidemiology spent an afternoon in a coffee shop discussing and reading about H5N1, with a focus on how an individual should orient towards this (as opposed to say, the government). This is a write-up of what I took away from that exercise, written from my perspective.

Some ideas were generated in collaboration with Claude but generally spot checked. This post was also sanity-checked by a friend who works in epidemiology. I feel ok about the ideas presented but would not be surprised if someone with more expertise has a significantly different conclusion. Any mistakes are mine.

I went into this exercise with a prior of “I’ve been hearing about bird flu for years, and it's always been nothing, it's probably nothing again this time.” The main upshot is that I walked away from the exercise thinking “I don’t [...]

---

Outline:

(01:15) What's different this year?

(03:00) What to watch for

(05:10) Vaccine response

(06:50) Sociopolitical response

(07:36) How bad would a pandemic actually be?

(09:48) What else?

---

First published:
December 5th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHocwRbx5QicW3oAf/should-you-be-worried-about-h5n1

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Should you be worried about H5N1?” by gw

LessWrong (30+ Karma)