As I understand it you can actually drown as your body’s immune system floods your lungs
Most strains of influenza give the average victim the opportunity to treat the disease and recover from it fully, if they are aware that they’re fighting flu and take it seriously enough to treat it before it cause lungs to fill with fluid. Flu deaths often occur as a result of influenza becoming a bacterial infection which then gets into the blood streams causing multiple organs to start becoming poisoned, thereby resulting in multiple organ failure, shock, and death.
In some strains of influenza, though, the cause of death can be acute respiratory failure, and this is the scenario that epidemiologists fear the most: a strain of influenza that is highly contagious, rapidly mutating, and inflicts immediate and overwhelming damage to the respiratory system (usually through rapid fluid buildup). It doesn’t matter how advanced modern medicine is: there is nothing that modern medicine could do stop such a strain from killing a lot of people very, very quickly.
Therefore (and I believe someone said it up thread), the best defense against another mega-outbreak isn’t necessarily modern medicine, but rather preparation for a public health emergency and public health monitoring. Drugs won’t stop another pandemic, but if public health systems are adequately prepared, they can convince people to stay home from school or work, and to quarantine people to a reasonable extent. A lot of people will still die, and it will shock people, but good monitoring and preparation can prevent a bad outbreak from becoming a calamity that could actually cause social, economic, and political chaos.
This is another reason why this strain of anti-science, anti-intellectualism, pro-conspiracy thinking - not just on the right but among “vaxers” - is potentially deadly. It damages confidence people have in the very institutions we will ultimately need to function at the top of their game in such an emergency.