Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20180823132725/@comment-9041013-20180824002236

I didn't feel it at all, that's not how mass hysteria works, the symptoms end up being real, they are just random as fuck so you can't really point a reason. It's a mind over matter thing, which in simple words means people stress themselves so badly their body gets sick.

Now in your story, I think it would be better if you took the "Ghost illness" and turned into into a "Spanish Influenza 2.0" driven by mass hysteria. Let the kid have an actual flu that seems to be getting better for him to be well enough to attend his exam. Now, the kid not wanting to take it pretends his illness gets actually far worse than it is, perhaps by some sort of trickery, faking his fever or making up symptoms that one cannot "check" like convulsions and lack of mental clarity for lack of a better term for example. From there on, people who hear of this kid with a crazy flu who have the flu themselves start stressing out and get complications that are common in the flu patients. The catch is that suddenly relatively healthy adults and young adults start falling apart because of the flu. The elderly get flashbacks of pandemics passed and the cycle spins out of control until people who should not die from the flu drop like flies.

Eventually it becomes a sort of Black Death like scenario just driven by hysteria.

Also, the whole thing where you say that the kid admits to causing this whole thing and the gov't is after him should be scrapped. It's unrealistic. Maybe have him snapping in public in front of a crowd of ailing people that he faked this whole thing being more than the common seasonal Influenza simply to be brushed off.

Also, the time span should be relatively short, people should be getting very ill or dying in a matter of days to a couple of weeks, no more than that. That signifies the seriousness of the matter.

I hope it helps.