Everyone who works in public health is already exhausted. Many of the things put in place during the last pandemic are either already dismantled when COVID money got clawed back in reconciliation a year or so back, or is zeroed out in the next Republican budget. Any public willingness to engage in widespread nonpharmaceutical interventions is effectively gone. Anti-vaccine sentiment is quite high right now.
We'll pick up in a worse place.
And gloves! Talk about gloves... they only became available for sale again close to 2021. Around here they are already hard to find (no idea why).
They buried the lede. This is story about testing people who work in dairy farming, and finding out that a small number of people had inconsequential infections.
For those who will surely try, you can't just divide 8 (number of infections) by 115 (total population tested) and use that proportion for anything. The error bars are large (specifically, using Fisher's Exact, from 3% to 13%).
Edit: while the original Stat title is atrocious clickbait, a truly non-fear-mongering title would be something like "Asymptomatic bird flu infections in a small sample of farm workers"
"A low number, but non-zero" isn't great information, but it's a start. Because understanding so-called "inconsequential infections" would have been very helpful at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Cases are obviously symptomatic and will seek healthcare" is a very different beast from "Some people are shedding virus but are pretty sure they can power through".
> "Cases are obviously symptomatic and will seek healthcare" is a very different beast from "Some people are shedding virus but are pretty sure they can power through".
Thankfully, the article tells you that human-to-human transmission isn't a concern, so there's no need to speculate.
I don't agree, and I would point out they used identical language mere weeks before covid-19 exploded [0]. Federal bureaucracies are reactive, not proactive.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-... ("Coronavirus risk to American public is low, health secretary says"; February 26, 2020)
I'm not making any points or claims about the human pandemic risk, because I don't know. My point is a narrow one: that the CDC's current messaging language is low-signal and shouldn't be interpreted heavily.
...and they made exactly the same mistakes of extrapolation from a small sample when they did that.
You cannot conclude anything meaningful to the general population from a tiny sample of farmworkers.
India is the sixth-largest consumer of chicken [1] and fourth-largest of beef [2] in the world.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/chicken-c...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/beef-cons...
Take a look at the per-capita numbers for the real story, where they're in the bottom 20 or so out of ~190.
This is a very different argument.
We won't be. We could, in short order, if we all wanted to, without having to "ctrl-z the last ~60 years of population growth around the world" as asserted upthread.
This is akin to we could wish war away. Like sure. We could.
If you want to reduce chicken consumption, the practical route is reducing population or wealth.
[1] https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/indias-protein-defici...
These are hard stats to combine into a "it's the not-meat-eating that's the problem"; either one stat is wrong/misleading (I suspect "meat" includes fish, for example), or there are other factors than "not enough chicken".
The data says that most of the population eats meat, and nearly of the population consumes animal proteins, but and in spite of that, most of the population is not eating enough protein.
Since they're not eating enough protein, as is, removing animal protein seems like a bad idea. Suggesting that they would be ok even if animal protein were removed, when all evidence says they're having trouble even with animal protein, doesn't seem realistic.
The more realistic approach would be to add more protein to India. One way to do this would be more animals (I don't know how this maths would work).
Doubtless plenty of the 60-75% demographic that eats some amount of meat, are getting insufficient protein.
I speculate that's because meat is not readily available to them - though it's likely also true that the non-meat foods they're eating are not filling the protein gap either.
* 60 to 75% of the population eats meat [1][2].
* Only 9% is vegan, so the remaining vegetarians still consumes dairy (Paneer, etc), and in some regions, the vegetarians eat eggs and fish.
* 73% of the population has a protein deficiency [3].
91% of the population consumes animal proteins, and they generally aren't getting enough.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/08/eight-in-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272322/india-typical-ea...
[3] https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/indias-protein-defici...
Your link agrees with me; "39% of Indian adults describe themselves as 'vegetarian'".
> 73% of the population has a protein deficiency...
Is the population growing?
I was vegetarian for a while and didn't mind it.