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Comment by subharmonicon | Hacker News Reader

Calling every sniffle “the flu” is a bit of a peev of mine. I hear it from people all the time.

Based on the descriptions I have read of influenza, I’m relatively certain I have either never had it or have had it maybe once in my adult life.

Most years I get a bad cold that lasts 5 days or so (plus some time for my sinuses to completely return to normal) and maybe a couple lesser colds. None of these are “the flu”.

I get the flu vaccine every year, but only started that around age 35 or so. I’m in my early 50’s now.

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I think part of it is the guilt of taking time off of work so everything gets dubbed "the flu" to justify it.

I've only had the flu once that I know of after an conference in Las Vegas about 12yrs ago, and it was the worst illness I've ever had. I went into work on day 1, immediately turned around went home, and nearly passed out going up the stairs. The next three days were a fugue of blinking and the shadows from the trees outside moving.

Yeah back when I first started WFH (2015-ish) I skipped the flu shot for 2-3 years due to simple laziness until I finally caught the real thing. It was 3 solid days of 103F fever which was sweating in bed, combined with all kind of mild hallucinatory effects and complete incapacity, and the week after the fever broke I had a hard time just moving my body for more than 30-60 minutes at a time before having to lie down. The hangover lasted about a month before my energy levels got back to normal ("post-viral fatigue" before that term became popular -- also there's probably a risk of persistent ME/CFS or "long influenza" post-recovery).

For anyone with unvaccinated proper influenza there should be no question of if you're going to work or not. You're not going to be capable of it. Trying to order groceries online should be highly mentally taxing.

I'd strongly recommend once someone sees a fever above 100F that they get antivirals as well and not try to suffer through it like a dumbass.

(Tangentially, compare to people who "got the worst sickness of their adult life" in late 2019 and swear they were patient zero of COVID in the US -- probably just influenza, 19/20 was a bad season before COVID hit).

My favorite is "I caught the 24 hour flu". No, sorry, you had some stomach bug.

This is what wikipedia says. It doesn’t sound particularly uncommon.

“During seasonal epidemics, it is estimated that about 80% of otherwise healthy people who have a cough or sore throat have the flu.”

From the source paper that is being referenced (from Nature):

> During seasonal influenza epidemics, diagnosis on the basis of clinical presentation has reasonable accuracy in previously healthy young and middle-aged adults, in whom the presence of fever with either cough or sore throat is associated with influenza virus infection in ~80% of patients.

So Wikipedia doesn’t add that this statement is about the accuracy of diagnosis by a clinician, and completely ignores the important symptom of a fever.

Just prior to the statement referring to 80%, Wikipedia also states the following, with references:

> In a typical year, influenza viruses infect 5–15% of the global population

Agree. The conversation on this thread seemed to be trending toward the conclusion that influenza is rare. It certainly is not.

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