There’s an unwritten rule in publishing, or so I’ve been told: don’t write about COVID. Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in. When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch.

But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time: how quickly systems buckle, how two decades of coronavirus warnings accumulated without adequate preparedness, and how the very mechanisms we rely on for safety can become the scaffolding of a next disaster.

This matters now as another threat is taking shape: highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as bird flu.

Bird flu still poses a low‑probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds – 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‑offs.

The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk – a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds.

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