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H1N1 as of 01-oct-2026

Sharon Astyk a day ago · I really need to write an updated H5N1 post, but I’ve been incredibly busy, and haven’t had a chance, so I want to combine a couple of my older posts with some current info, and will do a more updated post, particularly about my concerns about current outbreaks in mink and across the world, when I can. But here’s some stuff you need to know about H5N1.

In the last four years, I’ve written a LOT about H5N1, watching it gradually adapt to mammals, add critical mutations, and spread widely and across hundreds of new species.

We are almost certainly headed for a high mortality (above 10%) global bird flu pandemic that probably lasts multiple YEARS (the 1918 flu, which was a strain of avian influenza, but not H5N1 lasted 18 months and infected a third of the global population.)

First of all, why do I think it is coming inevitably and probably soon?

If you were to ask me as a science writer who watches this closely to describe the last few years in terms of how the virus has changed it would be this. (This is flattening the history, and of course, bird flu goes back well beyond this, but for the purposes of our discussion.)

2021-2022 - First widespread emergence in wild mammals on a previously unknown scale. Adaptation to mammals is a HUGE thing, and observation that mammal cases often cause neurological symptoms. Ongoing sporadic cases in humans usually with poultry contact.

2022-2023 - Mass death in seals, and wild cats, spread to a wider range of birds than previously seen, emergent outbreaks in commercial ferrets and mink (good mixing vessels for mutation.)

2023-2024 - Bird flu moves into cows, multiple human cases are linked to cows, reports of undetected human cases linked to cows and poultry, and possible infection of farmworker family members. H5N1 in wastewater nationally. Scientists warn that we are about 3 mutations from a highly lethal (50% of known cases, probably lower, but still much higher than covid.) Most known human cases are milder and mostly eye-related because human eyes have suitable receptors, while I our lungs don’t. US farmworkers report whole families becoming ill with conjunctivitis and respiratory symptoms. Disposal of poultry and cattle remains enables potential spread, we learn it can spread by flies, mice and poultry dust.

2024-2025 - H5N1 reaches Australia and Antarctica, meaning it is now EVERYWHERE. Widespread outbreaks in poultry herds, at least one pig detection (pigs are perfect mixing vessels), increasing human cases including sporadic cases that suggest community transport. Studies in ferrets (who are the best cognate for humans in flu studies) find H5N1 to be both airborne and highly lethal. Spread of the more lethal D strain which is found more widely in poultry and in some mammals. Indications there is undetected human spread. Trump and RFKjr shut down reporting, investigation and all of a sudden, after averaging at least one known human case a month for a year and a half, we have zero known cases. US immigration policy means that the most likely people to be infected, farmworkers, are afraid to seek medical care and are often being moved rapidly around the world through deportation. Rising numbers of human cases in Southeast Asia - Cambodia and Vietnam particularly, linked to poultry, often in children. While all the receptor shifts are not in place, all the mutations for a global pandemic are, although not necessarily in the same variants of H5N1. Trump cancels funding for H5N1 mRNA vaccine in progress.

2025-2026 - With no detection in place, the CDC gutted and absolutely no one watching, fall migration rapidly spreads H5N1 to mammals, domestic poultry farms and birds around the world everywhere. Sudden rapid outbreaks in almost every nation. Meanwhile most global residents have had 3-12 covid infections, and are experiencing immune damage, and an early an severe flu season with a new player (H3N2) creates opportunities for mixing. Serological analysis notes a doubling of antibodies from a couple of years ago in European poultry workers, suggesting undetected cases operating in human bodies, and the same is almost certainly happening elsewhere. WHO reports that current estimate of mortality of KNOWN cases is 48%, and higher in children (we’ll talk about known cases vs undetected spread in a minute.)

Fall 2026 - Rumors of cases in farmworkers have been consistent, with multiple whistleblowers noting farmworker illness associated with outbreaks, and reporting that the CDC is actively declining to test or report. H5N1 reaches Australia and NZ region. Outbreak in Utah mink is especially concerning as it brings solitary animals into close proximity with farmworkers during flu season. Also, previous era restrictions on moving sick animals and testing requirements for fairs and other public venues reduced.

So if you are new to this subject, that’s a general overview of the last few years, and illustrates a pattern of mutation, expansion, escalation and an increase in clear attempts to AVOID tracking and detection.

At this point, most of the ingredients for a pandemic are in place - and you don’t have to take my word for it. In 2024, Your Local Epidemiologist said that it would be either this (year or next (2026) year. The German government last fall warned that all the pieces are in place for a pandemic, and so has the WHO.

So what are we waiting on? Well, we’re waiting on an accident which will allow the virus access to human lung receptors, and put all the mutations together in one place.

Flu viruses are extremely promiscuous when they meet other flu viruses - they basically shake hands and trade a piece of DNA, and so all we need is one co-infection in a pig, a mink or a person, where the relevant mutations to enhance spread are traded out. Pigs are particularly troubling because they don’t get very sick from either human or avian flu viruses, and can easily harbor both together and mix them. Mink, ferrets and other mustelids are particularly concerning because their respiratory tracts are so much like ours that they are used to model how a pandemic might operate, and it would be easy for a virus to pick up human lung adaptations from them.

There’s no predicting when that will happen, but it is more likely with more opportunities. Basically it is a one in the million shot, but we are giving it millions of shots.

For most of the time before the 2020s, H5N1 had few opportunities, because there were few cases, and it was found in comparatively few species. Now it has a lot, and sooner or later the dice will come up with a pandemic. And if that doesn’t happen, it is also possible that the lethality genes in H5N1 will ALSO or intead enter seasonal flu, making our flus more dangerous.

While I truly hope I’m wrong, I suspect it will be this winter or spring - our early and abundant flu, the immune damage of a widespread covid, the odds of coinfection that is literally doing nothing to reduce spread or avoid immune damage go up. I could be wrong about this - but I think we’re headed into the bird flu winter or spring in the coming year.

And of course, for Americans, this is by FAR the worst imaginable time for this, because we have a government that is ALREADY ACTIVELY trying to kill people.

And do remember that the accellerationist elements of the tech bros are LOOKING for a global population collapse - that is, there are at least some elements in this administration that will see a high mortality pandemic as a good thing, to be encouraged (again you don’t have to believe me, this has been said aloud.)

NOW THIS TOTALLY SUCKS, BUT BEFORE I go there, I want to tell you the most important good news, the one thing I want you to take away from this more than anything else. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE FROM THIS. YOU ARE NOT DOOMED.

The MOST important thing to know about Bird flu and flu in general is that it is MUCH EASIER TO STOP FLU THAN COVID.

Read that sentence a couple of times, and repeat it. If you think you are doomed, read it again. I am not saying this will be easy, or fun or that people won’t die. But from a purely mechanical standpoint, you will not get bird flu if you mask and wash your hands and are very careful about animal contact. You just won’t. Is it perfect? No. Is that good news? Sure, if you want to dance on the graves of these scumbags. Don’t let them kill you.

How do we know? Because in 2020 and 2021, we had virtually no flu, so much so that one whole strain of influenza went completely extinct.

But we also still HAD covid transmission, so we know flu didn’t just magically disappear - it was stopped by our covid protections, even though not all covid was.

And this was true EVEN in 2021, when millions of school kids were all back in school wearing cloth masks in the inadequate way that children often do mask.

That is, even with inadequate masks, and not the most careful behavior, flu went down to functionally zero. That is important and good news.

So even when people were wearing cloth masks (much less effective) and even when the public schools were open, influenza was mostly stopped by very simple masking and surface cleaning.

One strain of covid now documented to have been nearly as infectious as measles, which is the world’s most infectious disease.

Flu has a much lower R0 (how many people get infected), and is easier to avoid in several respects - besides its high degree of transmissibility, covid also has a nearly 50% asymptomatic case, and a long period of pre-symptomatic transmissibility, and people don’t clear the virus entirely in most cases, so has long lingering transmissibility to.

So if you were to implement the same basic strategies used to stop covid, it would work on H5N1 in most respects. There are a few things that flu does a little better than covid - it transmits better on fomites (surfaces) so the cleaning that was largely unnecessary for covid would come back and it transmits more in food, so you do need to cook your food well and wash hands carefully when cooking.

There also concerns from pets (cats are particularly vulnerable to bird flu and should be kept INDOORS, and if you care for outdoor cats, you should wear PPE, keep dogs away from dead birds and out of muddy areas) and livestock - we know that it has been found in all domestic mammals and poultry, so if you care for livestock, wear PPE, leave your shoes outside and do not bring the animals into your home.

Make sure your screens and rodent protection are good, and if you live near poultry plants, you may want to mask outside on windy, dry days because studies show that bird flu can be transmitted from manure dust. You need air filters indoors as well.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it is still easier to avoid flu than covid if you mask, wash hands and are careful, and you should be, because the combination is a terrible one - covid causes lasting B and T Cell disruption, which is what helps us fight off illnesses. Covid makes it more likely you will get bird flu, and that you won’t be able to fight it off.

The other thing you need to know is that Bird flu is much more deadly in children than in adults, unlike covid (although covid is much more deadly to children that most adults like to admit, and infants under 1 year are as likely to die as most seniors from covid) so you are going to need to protect your kids and our kids and all kids hard.

So, I said we’d talk about the fact that the actual mortality rate is almost certainly not going to be the 48% that the WHO currently estimates.

And that’s because we know that undetected cases and asymptomatic cases exist (the two are not the same, undetected cases may have symptoms, but no one ever identified it as bird flu - and that’s extremely common. Even the states with the best flu detection protocols usually only test hospitalized patients, and after they have already come back negative for other strains, if they do, so detection rates are low - remember how you could once only get tested for covid if you’d travelled internationally? Low testing = low detection.)

What that means is that there are more bird flu cases out there than we are detecting (especially now that RFK jr appears to be actively refusing to test exposed farmworkers), and since most of the detected cases were detected because they had a reason to suspect bird flu, either be cause of severity or exposure, the odds are good that when it happens the 48% mortality rate will go down.

But what won’t happen is that it won’t go down to anything like the 2% mortality that we had at the beginning of covid (you know, when the bodies were being kept in refrigerator trucks because there was nowhere to bury them.)

The WHO estimates that mortality would be between 12 and 28%, and I tend to use a working number of 10-20% for ease of analysis.

It is also worth noting that the current survival rate includes people like the BC teen who was on ECMO (highest level of ICU care) at a pediatric hospital for over a month - and we know from covid that when hospitals were overwhelmed, mortality rates doubled. So we can expect that rate to rise during the worst waves.

It is worth noting that even a 10% mortality rate is a civilization disrupting event. The current assumptions rest heavily on two things that I would not personally bet on - first, that even given many opportunities to mix viruses, this won’t happen, and second, that it will be milder than we have seen previously. But even if that is true initially, it is worth remembering that the 1918 “Spanish” (it started in the US, actually) flu first appeared in spring of 1918, and had no higher mortality than average flu associated with it, but by fall of 1918, became the flu that would kill 50-100 million people.

The Spanish flu was also an avian flu, and possibly the best parallel for our current situation, spread, as it was, from a barracks in Kansas around the world by WW1. But at that point, air travel was comparatively rare and still the virus spread globally - we will probably not be absolutely sure what’s going on until a pandemic is well underway, just as occurred in covid. And we can count on the current government to deny. So it will probably not be enough to plan for the pandemic WHEN it happens, unless we want a repeat of covid with a much, much more dangerous disease.

Since we do not, it behooves us to understand what is happening and prepare. More soon. If you’d like to talk about this and how to prepare, you are welcome to join our free (donations accepted) class on 10/10 and get our free (or whatever you choose to pay) workbook on preparing for H5N1.