content: Every single story I've heard has always been (a) a stranger mentioned on the news or (b) someone with two degrees of separation (minimum) from the "victim". The couple that my family members have mentioned have been elderly and with existing health complications, i.e. one with advanced kidney disease and the other with heart problems. I'm going to be honest and say that I have just about zero trust in the diagnoses being made anyway. First of all, how many of the tests that are supposed to be occurring actually are, are the tests themselves as reliable as we'd imagine, and how many of the diagnoses are just being fudged on the basis of presumption by medical experts? It's all such a cluster fuck that there isn't much data I trust right now. People die. The elderly die. Flu kills the elderly during flu season. I've got absolutely nothing within my field of experience right now to suggest that this was anything more than, at most, a nasty variety of flu season. Frankly, I'm not sure it even meets that standard. Many of my friends and people close to me are getting the impression this was a flu season turned into something of a panic by pure media manipulation - making it one of the more flagrant media deceptions in memory, or perhaps indicative of the absolute fucked state of our information systems (amplified by a desperate, dying field of journalism).