[refurb]

I've noticed with Covid is that there is a lot of attention to edge cases with folks implying that the scenario is common. That's a very alarmist approach.

Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it. Not because they have a comorbidity, they just have a really bad reaction to the flu.

But we don't assume that those edge cases are the most typical course of disease. Yes, you may be one of those really unlucky ones that die from a normally non-fatal disease, but the risk of that is pretty low.

[gnusty_gnurc]

This is how social media works; keep people engaged and cause them to experience large swings in emotion.

So as with almost everything nowadays (e.g. look up police brutality statistics and compare to common perception re: pervasiveness), the formula is simple: paint an exciting/horrifying view of reality by sensationalizing rare events.

[xienze]

> Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it.

Way off! Tens of millions catch and tens of thousands die from the flu every single year in the US. And that's with a vaccine! You probably didn't know that though because news stations don't have rolling infection and death counters going 24/7 during flu season.

[refurb]

That's true. In 2018, ~80,000 Americans died from the flu. However, most of those had some comorbidity that exacerbated the course of the flu.

When I mentioned hundreds or thousands, I'm talking about healthy, young people dying of the flu. It's rare, but it does happen.

My point is that we don't look at those cases and assume that how the flu affects everyone.