That which does not kill me ...

A hundred years ago, the flu pandemic killed about two percent of the world's population at that time.  To put that in contemporary numbers, imagine if the Coronavirus killed 150 million this year!

Yet another reason I am thankful that I am alive now, and not in the bad old days, which people often mistakenly refer to as the good old days!

Viruses of many types have always been a menace to humans.  Remember smallpox? Polio?  Bastards these viruses are.  And they mutate.  If only the damned idiots in the Republican Party will accept and understand natural selection and evolution; they perhaps don't even have the word "mutate" in their dictionaries!

Unfortunately, the anti-vaxxer idiots are highly influential as this news report shows:

One recent post came from the mother of a 4-year-old Colorado boy who died from the flu this week. In it, she consulted group members while noting that she had declined to fill a prescription written by a doctor.
The child had not been diagnosed yet, but he was running a fever and had a seizure, the mother wrote. She added that two of her four children had been diagnosed with the flu and that the doctor had prescribed the antiviral Tamiflu for everyone in the household.
“The doc prescribed tamiflu I did not pick it up,” she wrote.

The child died!

The mother’s recent posts have now been deleted from Stop Mandatory Vaccination, but in group posts going back to 2017 she said she had not vaccinated her children from the flu.
The mother did not respond to a request for comment.
A Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “This is a tragedy and our thoughts are with his family and loved ones. We don’t want vaccine misinformation on Facebook, which is why we’re working hard to reduce it everywhere on the platform, including in private groups.”

How does the flu become a killer?

The short and morbid answer is that in most cases the body kills itself by trying to heal itself. “Dying from the flu is not like dying from a bullet or a black widow spider bite,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “The presence of the virus itself isn't going to be what kills you. An infectious disease always has a complex interaction with its host.”

Amesh Adalja.  Hmmm ... The name suggests he might be a bad hombre from Gujarat!  Have to alert the immigration folks ;)

After entering someone's body—usually via the eyes, nose or mouth—the influenza virus begins hijacking human cells in the nose and throat to make copies of itself. The overwhelming viral hoard triggers a strong response from the immune system, which sends battalions of white blood cells, antibodies and inflammatory molecules to eliminate the threat. T cells attack and destroy tissue harboring the virus, particularly in the respiratory tract and lungs where the virus tends to take hold. In most healthy adults this process works, and they recover within days or weeks. But sometimes the immune system's reaction is too strong, destroying so much tissue in the lungs that they can no longer deliver enough oxygen to the blood, resulting in hypoxia and death.

We've met the enemy, ... and it is our own immune system?

Some studies suggest that during the infamous 1918 global flu pandemic, most people died from subsequent bacterial infections. But more virulent strains such as those that cause avian flu are more likely to overwhelm the immune system on their own.

It is such public health nightmares from which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) protects us.  tRump and his crazies don't value the CDC:

Funding has also been cut drastically to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), forcing it to reduce or discontinue epidemic-prevention efforts in 39 out of the 49 countries it had been helping. Among the countries where CDC efforts were scaled back were Haiti, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as China, where the agency provided technical assistance.
In its 2020 budget the Trump administration proposed a further 10% cut in CDC funding, equivalent to $750m. It zeroed out funding for epidemiology and laboratory capacity at state and local levels.

Keep calm, and carry on!