One U.S. person, a Louisiana resident, has died after contracting bird flu since the beginning of 2024. There have been around 950 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans internationally since 2003, and around half those people have died, according to World Health Organization data.

Any time a person catches H5N1, or bird flu, their infection is a chance for the virus to mutate in the wrong direction. When someone dies from the bird flu—as an elderly Louisiana man did on Jan. 6,

With reports of the first human death from bird flu in the US, some Americans are feeling an uncomfortable flashback to the early days of Covid-19, when infectious disease experts were talking about a new virus that was sending people to the hospital with respiratory infections.