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So if Senator Byrd lost his mother in the Great Influenza when he was a year old, then that makes him about a year older than my mother's father, who very nearly went down with the ship when my great-grandmother came down with it during her pregnancy with him. I've been reading up on the 1918 flu since I decided to visit a plague of some form upon the Prequel, and it makes me shudder to think how close my whole family came to not being here. (My great-grandfather was told to prepare himself to lose them both, that's how close we all came to never being born...) I've settled upon a slightly less lethal strain for my own purposes, though, since with the quasi-academic "wizard's union" setting skewing older to begin with, even an "ordinary" Bad Flu Year would be a worry to them.
And speaking of skewing older, Mum's going to try for a flu-shot this year, since her delivery-drone job makes her the perfect vector to spread anything she catches across the whole city; I'm thinking that the public-health authorities would be sufficiently appreciative of her thoughtfulness on that score not to deny her on the age-related technicality that the shortage has made them impose. Me, however, I'm just flapping out here in the breeze again, being neither elderly nor sufficiently immunocompromised to get away with claiming a dose for myself. Bah. Just hoping that this year's strain doesn't turn out to be a 1918-type bug, because the true horror of the pandemic was the mortality rate for healthy young adults...
And speaking of skewing older, Mum's going to try for a flu-shot this year, since her delivery-drone job makes her the perfect vector to spread anything she catches across the whole city; I'm thinking that the public-health authorities would be sufficiently appreciative of her thoughtfulness on that score not to deny her on the age-related technicality that the shortage has made them impose. Me, however, I'm just flapping out here in the breeze again, being neither elderly nor sufficiently immunocompromised to get away with claiming a dose for myself. Bah. Just hoping that this year's strain doesn't turn out to be a 1918-type bug, because the true horror of the pandemic was the mortality rate for healthy young adults...