Everyone has so much going on at the turn of the year — family trips punctuated by someone getting a funny cough, New Year’s regrets and resolutions, the agonizing stretch between January 6 and Inauguration Day through which to remain medicated. Many of us put up buffers to make it. But into your carefully guarded cone of quiet may come a news item with a whiff of terror. The eggs are suddenly expensive or have gone missing from the stores. Your local geese are wheezing themselves to death. You may hear the troubling phrase a rare flu coupled with the more disturbing in a child.
This shiver of déjà vu is brought to us by the current avian-influenza outbreak. Since March, when the H5N1 virus was discovered in a single cow in Texas — the first time that a strain of the bird flu had ever been seen in cattle — it has popped up with increasing frequency, like jump scares in the haunted house of our food system: at poultry and dairy farms, in beef cattle, at meatpacking plants, in bottled raw milk. Then, in November, a teenager in British Columbia who was extremely ill with the virus, who had been all over the news, seemed to disappear: Around American Thanksgiving, the province’s health department said the case had been closed and there would be no further updates. On November 19 in Alameda, California, doctors identified the first case of bird flu in a child in the U.S., and no one could figure out how it had happened. On December 12, scientists announced that horses could get it, too. On December 13, it was reported that two farmworkers in California had contracted the virus and that one person in Louisiana, with a backyard flock of sick birds, was seriously ill. And then a week before Christmas, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the outbreak, calling his decision a “proactive action”; it was intended, he said, to ensure that the government could respond quickly and flexibly to what may come next.
Still, no one seems to really believe that another pandemic could be on the way. Most of us have developed sturdy denial mechanisms since COVID first arrived. What good would it even do us to let this information in? We know how Americans, collectively, handled this the last time around. Imagining it playing out all over again is like hitting yourself in the face. No one will wear masks, we think; no one will listen to the government; the government itself might effectively throw up its hands. We know that COVID still kills, with a body count just shy of 50,000 Americans in 2024, and it feels like a stretch to say that Americans are particularly concerned. Most have stopped getting vaccinated against the virus.
Many of us might not be willing to face the reality of another changed world. We know now that pandemics create major and lasting turning points in our lives: In 2023, more than half of people surveyed said that their lives had not returned to normal since the COVID outbreak, and a surprising number — 47 percent — said they now believe their lives will never return to normal.
But do we really know how a new pandemic would go and how we would handle it? Things are different this time — and in ways that aren’t all bad. Unlike with COVID in the spring of 2020, millions of doses of bird-flu vaccines at various stages of testing sit in government stockpiles, and more are on the way. There are also already tests that work, though these are not broadly available to the public.
What about us and our exhausted minds? Or our angry fellow Americans who supposedly hate government health interventions more than anything? Recent research suggests that we might actually manage a second pandemic better than we would believe. Despite all the noise to the contrary, a June poll by Harvard’s School of Public Health says that Americans overall think the government responses to COVID — asking people to wear masks, pausing indoor dining, requiring health-care workers to get vaccinated — were all good ideas. Although the media tends to paint school closures as radically unpopular, only 44 percent of respondents said they currently think the shutdowns were a mistake.
A growing body of research also suggests that many Americans feel stronger for what we endured during the most extreme days of COVID. Counter to what we like to say about our friends and neighbors and children, the challenge of the pandemic may have benefited some people’s mental health. One study found that “children entering the pandemic with clinically meaningful mental-health problems experienced notable improvements in their mental health.” (Turns out there’s one thing worse than shutting down an American school and that’s having to attend it.)
A bird-flu pandemic is not an exhilarating prospect. Though the strains of the virus currently in circulation may not be as lethal to humans as those in the past (previous mortality rates have reached as high as 50 percent), we know it would be deadly to some and dangerous to many. But could we, as a society, handle it? Probably.
We don’t know if we’ll have to find out: There is no real information on the likelihood of the virus crossing over. Infectious-disease specialists don’t like to make predictions. What we do know is that we are really rolling the dice. Early in December, a terrifying report was published in Science: A study from Scripps Research Institute scientists said that it would take only a “single mutation” in the genetic material of the avian influenza currently making the rounds for it to become well adapted for human infection. “If H5 is ever going to be a pandemic,” one researcher told the publication, “it’s going to be now.”
As of late December, most government agencies were expressing calm and pushing for measured action. The CDC said it would like us to avoid birds and get flu shots. OSHA said people who work with animals should wear respiratory protection. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said to please not allow wild and domesticated birds to mingle and to dress game in a “well-ventilated area.”
Only about 60 people across the country have tested positive for bird flu in 2024, and the iterations coursing through animal populations seem never to have been transmitted person-to-person. Human-to-human transmissions have been documented in previous outbreaks, but this has always been exceedingly rare. As of this writing, this disease is for the birds. And cows. (And pigs and mice and cats and seals.)
All the flu pandemics of the 20th century, however, including the disastrous 1918 influenza that killed 20 million people, began in birds. As the traditional flu season begins in earnest, the disease will have ever more opportunity to tailor itself for human infection: Each time it meets with another virus is an occasion for reinvention.
More than 850 herds of dairy cattle across the country have been infected so far — the numbers are hard to specify, but this could mean millions of cows. As of December, a federal program to test the national milk supply had been rolled out in only six states; we have huge gaps in information. In California, which does test, and where tens of thousands of people work with cattle, about half the dairy herds have the virus. With the contagion uncontained in animals, and most American adults not vaccinated against regular influenza, we’re basically hosting an infinite-universe experiment for bird flu.
In a recent study of public attitudes in 33 nations, researchers were delighted to report that people felt slightly less terrible about their place in the world than they had over the past four years: “Only” two-thirds of people agreed that “2024 was a bad year for my country.” It was the most positive response to the survey since 2019. We have, in some respects, just gotten back on our feet. The idea of another pandemic sounds distinctly like a joke. Catastrophe, however, is a matter of chance.
