The flu is not a harmless disease, get that into your head. We have been vaccinating against the flu for decades, and yet there are about 400,000 deaths per year during an average influenza season.
More than 50% of Americans get the flu shot every year, we kind of have some immunity, and, yet, 20K to 60K people die every year, when only 10% get it (due to the flu shots or the immunity). Remove the immunity and flu shot preventing some infection, and even if it's as bad as the flu and doesn't have any permanent damage, which it seems to have, we're still talking hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
In an average year flu kills about 500k people, in the same sense of how we say those die from Covid. And infects about 1B, will a reasonable percentage of those resulting in serious disease.
So you're experience isn't typical; the average person knows more people who suffered of flu.
And while the number of deaths varies each season, the CDC estimates that the flu kills a minimum of 3,000 people in the US each year. Just to put this Ebola thing in perspective.
The flu has a mortality rate of something like 0.1%, 200 our of 7000 is already 3%, 30x as deadly. Of course these aren't final numbers but the flu infects and afflicts vastly many more people than it kills.
We're all pretty used to it so it doesn't seem like a big deal but it's actually very dangerous.
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