I read the article, and it appears that she died from a secondary infection brought on by her immune system being weakened by the flu. Since I didn't see in the article any mention of whether or not she got a flu shot I can't see the point of this article. Is the point of the article that people should get a flu shot? If it is, then the author didn't do a very good job of making his point. As I posted earlier approximately 200 kids age 5-9 die in the USA every day. Still not sure why this is newsworthy.
One tries to not become so hardened under the barrage of appeals to emotion that you feel nothing.
I am sorry she died, too young of course.
However, I don’t see the point of the article except to report a disaster and grab headlines and tug at our hearts. Fair enough I guess.
Furthermore, this is another artifact of the 24/7 news cycle to find something dramatic to report on and if not dramatic enough, make it that way. It is the preoccupation of journalism these days when they are not pushing the left and bashing the right.
I’m struggling to get excited about the flu. Perhaps since I have been fortunate not to have had it in what seems like decades and no, I don’t get the shot and yes I was out in the public every day up until about three years ago. Growing up we all had the flu. Sometimes every year. I remember being miserable especially if it went to what we called stomach flu but we seldom if ever heard of deaths. Have the strains of flu become more severe than they were 30 or 40 years ago? Is the excitement more about selling flu shots? I see several local schools have shut down in the last few weeks because of flu, this was common years ago, leading me to suppose that the current strain infecting kids is not one for which a vaccine was created this year.
I suppose this is the point:
In the wake of her loss, Shannon Sandvik has words of advice for other parents: “Trust your gut as a mom. I think she could have gone sooner if I did not make the choice to take her a bunch of times, no matter what anybody said.”
I’m not sure what else the mother could have done though since it was doctor, doctor, ER, blood work, doctor, hospital. Seems like they should have caught something with the first round of blood work. “Could have gone sooner if I did not make the choice to take her a bunch of times”.