Severe flu: 39°C fever and a cough that lasts two weeks

The harshest flu in years: 39°C fever and two weeks of coughing

This season's flu is not behaving like a three-day cold. Across very different areas, the cases described share the essentials: a fever that spikes to 39°C, muscle aches that leave the body “feeling beaten up” and a cough that is still there after the fever has gone. The dominant impression is that it has been years since something this rough went around. There are no official figures certifying an exceptional winter. What there is is widespread agreement among those who have had it firsthand.

The first thing that stands out is the duration. One account describes six days with fever peaks of up to 39ºC, another a whole week without eating a thing, and several a convalescence with cough and fatigue that drags on for two weeks beyond the peak. “Muscle aches like I hadn't felt in a long time,” sums up someone who has spent days alternating between 37.5 and 39.5°C. This is not something you shake off with paracetamol and an afternoon on the sofa.

Flu, Elbichito or both at once?

The confusion between flu and Elbichito has returned with a vengeance. Someone who lost their sense of smell and for months noticed “a dirty ashtray smell” insists flu never did that to them. The reply they get is that flu also changes how everything tastes —“even water tasted rotten,” says someone who had it thirty years ago— and that matching two illnesses because they share a couple of symptoms leads down dead ends. Another points to something more fundamental: that pharmacy tests, including one that came back positive for both influenza A and B at once, are “good for little more than taking your money.”

And in the middle of all this, children. One area describes a spike in bronchiolitis; another, kids whose fever goes up and down for four days before they infect their parents. The usual pattern: first the little ones, then the adults.

The flu vaccine and the health workers who won't get it

Skepticism about the flu vaccine does not come only from outside the health system. There is the case of a family doctor who, asked about it, replied: “I'm not going to get it, you do what you like.” And it is added, with a touch of irony, that the doctor ended up getting it. Another account, impossible to verify, tells of a woman admitted the day after being vaccinated because of an alleged autoimmune liver reaction. Caution is warranted: these are isolated experiences, not evidence of anything general.

On the other side weighs an old argument: flu doesn't knock down healthy young people, but it does older people, and that's why older people get vaccinated. A century ago people greeted each other with an until flu do us part, half joking, half serious.

Vitamin D, zinc and orujo (a Spanish grape-marc spirit) on an empty stomach

Where there is flu, there is a home remedy. The supplements repeat: vitamin D3 with K2 and zinc, plus NAC and vitamin C from citrus fruit and kiwis. One participant sums it up as no flu, no nonsense. Another relies on half a kilo of vegetables and a kilo of fruit a day, and a third on a glass of orujo on an empty stomach, though he admits that one day they will make him blow into a breathalyser and “I'll screw it up”.

The problem is that none of these formulas is measured or backed by hard data on what really protects. The conversation drifts into drier territory —the sugar in honey and tooth decay, intermittent fasting— without anyone providing evidence either way.

The contagion theory and the underlying skepticism

There was bound to be a strand that denies the very mechanism of contagion. Its argument: if simply being near a sick person were enough, we would all fall ill, and yet there is a couple who sleep in the same bed —one of them recently operated on— in which one gets sick and the other does not. The reply they get is reasonable: exposure is not enough, the system has to give way for the illness to appear, but more exposure raises the probability. The two things are compatible, even if it doesn't seem so.

The narrative of overload and the sick leave that causes resentment

Beyond the symptoms, the subject has an uncomfortable side: propaganda. Messages are cited that speak of hospitals “on the ropes” and of collapse in the face of official figures, which describe a normal winter. And then there is the suspicion that the illness is exaggerated out of convenience: some speak openly of flu malingering and of an allergy to work when it comes to taking sick leave.

With that in the mix, the season is most likely to run its course and most of those who are coughing now will recover without much drama. But the feeling that flu is hitting harder this year will not be dissolved by an official note.