Significantly worse than the flu - multi systemic organ damage. The narrative that covid is like the flu, is both wildly inaccurate as this paper explains, and also dangerous, leading to a more cavalier attitude towards covid prevention.
I can read data and understand it, but any good data scientist knows that you need real expertise in a domain to contextualize that data. It would be naive to think that my understanding of data directly translates to a strong understanding of this work. I'm not the domain expert.
The flu, the real flu, knocks you on the ass so hard that you actively start considering that death is a possibility and that heading over to the hospital would be a good idea.
I’ve had the flu perhaps twice. Once as a child, once in my early 50s. The latter completely recalibrated my understanding of illness.
You can catch the flu and have not much more than a cold or even be asymptomatic, then your grandma catches it off you and died from it
Nowadays in Finland (where I am from), they recommend flu vaccinations for kids who have type 1 diabetes in the family to reduce the risk of catching it.
Not all flus are bad to all of us, but if you catch the right strain, it can really knock you out.
The lay explanation of a virus is that it invades your cells and hijacks their machinery to make more of itself. That makes them all sound the same. For bacteria we at least can understand that they have different types of metabolism, come in different shapes, produce different defensive compounds, etc.