be laid up with flu

Don't you wish you'd been laid up with flu?

What was more, they've had to put up with a relief milker while their herdsman was laid up with flu.

But Weller - unlike a large number of the audience who had chosen to bring their snorts and sniffles with them, was laid up with flu in Vienna.

(NY) "Neil wanted me and the rest of the band to come up to his home studio and record some 'strange songs' he'd written while being laid up with flu."

They might also reveal that you have been in some distant shopping mall far from your usual stomping ground on a day on which you had sworn (at least to the office) that you had been laid up with flu.