I turned on the television last weekend and felt an immediate wave of déjà vu wash over me.
There it was again—that familiar breathless tone, the slow-motion footage of cleaners in full PPE spraying bleach, nurses looking exhausted, a reporter standing in a crowded A&E whispering about how the system is “on the brink.” Only this time the villain wasn’t SARS-CoV-2. It was influenza. Plain old flu. And yet the staging, the language, the quiet panic in the voiceover—it was all exactly the same.
Honestly, for a moment I thought I’d accidentally tuned into an archive clip from 2020.
The Return of the Greatest Hits Album Nobody Asked For
Winter viruses have always existed. Hospitals have always been busier between December and March. Beds have always been in short supply when respiratory bugs decide to party. And yet, every few years the media discovers this phenomenon as if it’s breaking news.
This year the chosen monster is a strain of influenza A called H3N2. It’s dominant, it’s nasty, and—surprise—it’s the same strain that caused absolute chaos in the winters of 2014-15 and 2017-18. Back then we called it a bad flu season. Today we call it “unprecedented.”
The difference? Timing and memory.
When “Record-Breaking” Only Goes Back Three Years
One of the most telling details buried in the latest scare stories is the data window journalists and health officials keep quoting. Whenever you hear the phrase “the highest since records began” applied to flu admissions, pause for a second.
Those records began in the winter of 2021-22.
Think about that. We’re being told this is the worst early-season flu surge ever… based on a dataset that completely ignores the entire decade before the pandemic. The brutal 2017-18 season—when excess deaths in England alone topped 50,000—doesn’t exist in this new official memory. Neither does 2014-15. It’s as if someone pressed delete on history and started the counter again the moment masks became fashion accessories.
It would be funny if it weren’t so manipulative.
The Script Hasn’t Changed—Only the Virus
Walk with me through a typical news package these days and tell me if any of this sounds familiar:
- Slow tracking shot down a hospital corridor
- Reporter wearing a mask (even though no one else is)
- Close-up of a cleaner aggressively bleaching a bed frame
- Interview with a visibly tired consultant saying “we’re at breaking point”
- Cut to ambulance bay with multiple vehicles waiting
- Voiceover: “Experts warn the peak is still weeks away”
Replace “COVID” with “flu” and you have 2020 all over again. Same cinematography. Same emotional music. Same carefully chosen phrases designed to activate that little knot of anxiety in your stomach.
I’m not saying hospitals aren’t busy. Of course they are. They always are in winter. But the presentation—the deliberate amplification of fear—is a choice.
Why Does This Formula Still Work?
Part of it is simple psychology. After three years of being trained to see respiratory illness as an existential threat, many people are primed to panic at the first cough in the office. We’ve essentially been conditioned.
Another part is institutional. Health systems love a crisis narrative because it brings money, well, resources. Extra funding, relaxed targets, public sympathy. Nobody ever got a budget increase by saying “we’re coping just fine, thanks.”
And then there’s the media itself. Fear works. It drives clicks, shares, eyeballs. A slow news day in December? Send a crew to the local hospital and film some ambulances. Instant content.
“When beds are full we have to move people – sometimes that means those who can sit are moved out of beds and into chairs.”
– Consultant filmed for a recent news segment
I’ve worked in and around healthcare communications long enough to know that sentence gets trotted out every single winter. Sometimes it’s chairs, sometimes it’s corridors. The quote changes, the imagery stays the same.
The Vaccine That Might Not Match
No fear campaign would be complete without the obligatory plug for vaccination—and this year’s flu jab is, by many accounts, a poor match for the dominant H3N2 strain circulating.
That hasn’t stopped the push, of course. The message is simple: get boosted anyway, because some protection is better than none. Fair enough. But when the primary tool being offered is acknowledged to be suboptimal, perhaps a little humility might be in order rather than apocalyptic messaging.
Especially when the same messaging that was used for a much more effective vaccine against a novel pathogen.
A Reality Check in Numbers
Let’s put this in perspective with some actual historical context the headlines conveniently ignore:
| Winter | Peak Flu Beds (England) | Excess Deaths |
| 2014–15 | ~4,500 at peak | ~28,000 |
| 2017–18 | ~5,000 at peak | ~50,000 |
| 2024–25 (current) | ~3,200 (early Dec) | Still counting |
We are nowhere near the levels of those earlier bad seasons—yet the rhetoric is dialed up to eleven. Curious, isn’t it?
So What Should We Actually Do?
Here’s the thing: flu is serious for some people. If you’re elderly or have serious comorbidities, the vaccine—however imperfect—is probably worth having. Basic hygiene, staying home when sick, and looking after vulnerable relatives still matter.
But the rest of us? Maybe it’s time to treat winter bugs like… winter bugs. Annoying, sometimes rough, but part of life on a planet covered in viruses.
We survived perfectly well before 2020 without nightly panic bulletins every December. We knew hospitals got full. We knew old people sometimes died of pneumonia after flu. We sent cards, made soup, and carried on.
Perhaps the healthiest response to this year’s “crisis” is a collective shrug and a quiet recognition that we’ve seen this movie before—and we know how it ends.
The credits roll in April. The birds come back. And somehow, miraculously, civilization endures.
Or to put it another way: the only thing truly unprecedented this winter is our apparently endless appetite for being terrified by completely precedented levels of seasonal illness.
Turn off the television. Go for a walk. Breathe the cold air.
You’ll probably catch something eventually. You’ll probably get better.
And next December, they’ll be back with the same script.
Some traditions never die.
