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The 20 year old felt the first sniffle on her way home from work Sunday afternoon. Monday afternoon, she (smartly) went to the hospital and was treated immediately. Tuesday evening, while doing everything they could to save her, she died. H1N1 has been confirmed as the cause.
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Yes, that can happen with any flu.
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It's usually people already sick, very old, or don't go to the hospital in a timely manner. This person did everything right.
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The key word there is "usually". This is like being shocked that you flipped a hundred coins, and came up with 75 heads and 25 tails.
Influenza kills millions every year. That includes a given proportion of otherwise perfectly healthy people who die, and also includes a lot of elderly frail people who survive it. The "right" thing to do is only statistically "right". Among the population which contracts H1N1, there is nothing particularly odd about this virus, other than that it is a strain against which the human population as a whole is relatively immunilogically naive so, yes, there is going to be substantial morbidity, and yes it is going to include a mix of folks biased toward certain populations, but a mix of folks nonetheless.
The point is that a given case of this flu is no more or less "deadly" than a given case of any other flu. Yes, it can kill you, as can a lot of other things. You remain at higher risk of death from going up or down your own staircase than you do from H1N1.
And, while I'm on that, please,
USE HANDRAILS ON STAIRS, or at least keep your hand near the handrail. And if you do use the handrail,
WASH YOUR HANDS.
I worked with a guy whose OCD was so bad, he would never touch a handrail on stairs or an escalator (and look at the jagged edges on escalator steps), because he didn't want to catch something from the handrail. The thing is, his risk of dying from a fall on the stairs was greater than his risk of dying from a disease picked up from the handrail. But some people refuse to be rational.