(excerpted)
A sore throat ... and 48 hours later Chloe was dead: Swine flu kills healthy girl aged six and a doctor
Chloe Buckley, six, died within 48 hours of complaining of a sore throat and just a day before her seventh birthday.
She was not given the anti-viral drug Tamiflu after her doctor apparently misdiagnosed her illness as tonsillitis.
On the same day, it was announced that Dr Michael Day, a 64-year-old GP who had been treating swine flu victims, had died after contracting the virus.
Both the little girl and the doctor are believed to have been perfectly healthy before succumbing to swine flu
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You said — Both the little girl and the doctor are believed to have been perfectly healthy before succumbing to swine flu
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That reminds me of the flu epidemic (of 1918) that my grandmother used to tell me about, all the time (when I was a kid). I remember the phrase that she used.... “They were dropping in the street like flies!”
I used to think, for many years, that she was just using colorful and exaggerated language to get the point across about how deadly it was. However, I found out, many years later (after looking into it), that some people would be fine in the morning, before going to work (i.e., showing or feeling no symptoms) and then by the end of the day and maybe by the time they got off work, they would literally “drop dead”... and I mean drop down dead while walking in the streets.
So, “dropping in the street like flies” was apparently true. I also read somewhere (when reading up on it in the past) that in some places (in the U.S.) there would be carts going around picking up dead bodies in the streets.
And so, yes, if these people in the 1918 flu epidemic could drop in the street like flies, feeling fine at the beginning of the day and being dead at the end of the day, this sort of thing you’re talking about could happen again.