[happytoexplain]

I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.

[rsynnott]

If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu.

What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.

[happytoexplain]

Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID.

As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.

[rsynnott]

I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu.

I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.