[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.