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FEBRUARY 7, 2020
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
JUST THE
S FLU?
AUGUSTARX.COM
ome people think the flu is nothing more than the sniffles, maybe a headache and some body aches thrown in. Guess what? Most of the time they’re right. Even symptoms of the headline-grabbing coronavirus are in most cases nothing that would give you nightmares: runny nose, sore throat, watery eyes, headache, coughing, sneezing (see page 3), mild fever and body aches. Most people with coronavirus think they have nothing more than an ordinary cold. All of that makes the following figures seem completely illogical: the 2014-2015 flu season killed around 51,000 people in the U.S. alone based WHAT IS CORONAVIRUS? on CDC estimates. 2015-2016 saw The name comes from the surface about 23,000 flu-related deaths, folprojections of the virus that look lowed by 38,000 in 2016-2017. Final data is still pending for the 2017-2018 like a royal crown or solar corona. The viruses were discovered in the and 2018-2019 flu seasons, but the early numbers are 61,000 and 34,000, 1960s, and were behind previous respectively. That’s well over 200,000 flu outbreaks like SARS and MERS. deaths in the U.S. alone in just the past five flu seasons, an average of more than 41,000 deaths per year. How does something whose symptoms seem no worse than a common cold end up killing people by the hundreds of thousands? How flu kills If we put ourselves into the mind of a killer (let’s go with a lion), our target of choice will be the weak and vulnerable. Easy pickings. That is our first clue to how and why flu kills: by preying on the weak. That could be the elderly or the very young, including infants who have yet to be fully inoculated. The same strain that might barely slow down a strong and healthy young adult could have devastating consequences for someone in infancy, in their 80s, or who for whatever reason has a weakened immune system. Every year, however, people who had been the very picture of health days before die suddenly from the flu. How does that happen? It should be noted first that, despite the alarming numbers above, death from the flu, even the current coronavirus, is a highly unusual event. Even Please see JUST THE FLU? page 3
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