About 8000 people die of normal seasonal flu in the UK every year. The NHS is always saying it can't cope every winter. Nothing we haven't heard before. You can check the statistics on official websites, in fact, 2013 -14 was an especially bad year and about 13,000 died.
The world didn't close down then, are we going to do this every year now when someone gets the first cough after Christmas? .....or before Christmas, maybe it's a plot to get rid of Christmas! Now there's a new case of flu in China caused someone eating a rat, apparently. It sounds like the animals fighting back to me, and about time too, to get rid of the humans who treat them so badly.