bluebelleknoll posted about this the other day
Peak flu season is imminent. Whether the peak is 2, 6, or 12 weeks away isn’t known, but we know a wave of winter illness is coming. The reason that it matters that many of us will be laid up with the regular old seasonal flu is something called co-infection. Co-infection is when a person is infected with two variants of the same virus simultaneously. Imagine this: A farmworker could get H5N1 influenza from a dairy cow and seasonal influenza from his school-aged child at the same time. (It would probably be a farmworker, but as the Louisiana case demonstrates, it wouldn’t have to be). Due to the way flu replicates inside the body, that co-infection could lead to what’s called a reassortment event, wherein the two kinds of flu genomes get mixed together in a host. This process could generate a new variant that possesses the worst features of both—a virus that is transmissible from person-to-person like the seasonal flu, and severe, like those two concerning cases of D1.1. Our immune systems are unlikely to recognize such a novel virus, and it may not matter if we’ve previously gotten the seasonal flu or received flu shots. This is how many prior influenza pandemics were born: a hellish marriage of two kinds of flu.
I have no confidence that Trump and rfvck Jr will do the right things