Aside from the short-term misery and lost workdays, flu can have more serious implications. Sure, most people who get the seasonal flu recover just fine. But the seasonal flu also hospitalizes 200,000 people in the U.S. each year. It kills between 3,000 and 49,000 people. That’s close to the number of women killed by breast cancer each year, and more than twice the number of people killed by AIDS.