How dangerous is Norovirus?

I just saw on a news site that they've diagnosed Norovirus at a factory in Chicago. It reminds me of what happened in Cleveland less than a month ago, where a huge number of college students got sick. They blamed the campus dining hall, even though plenty of people who never even stepped foot in the cafeteria ended up catching it too.
The same symptoms popped up in San Francisco around Christmas...

My question is, how dangerous is Norovirus really? Are there any long-term effects we should worry about, or is it just one of those seasonal bugs you can mostly ignore?

Here's the thing about this second one. That virus has been floating around long before this, and better diagnostic tools just finally let us flag it as its own specific strain. Honestly, it’s about as dangerous as any other common stomach bug out there—mostly just a headache for toddlers and seniors, unless something unexpected happens.

Thanks — I was actually a little concerned by what came up on the news 🙂

What’s the deal with people who are still stuck in the hospital, dealing with surgery recovery and all those drainage tubes?? :-((

My dad ended up stuck in the internal medicine ward at Mercury for a full week—right in that awkward stretch between Christmas and New Year's, naturally. He managed to pick up a virus, and since we were all playing nurse and visiting him, the whole family caught it too. My kids were out for a couple of days, and as for me, I spent one miserable night shivering under the covers before finally feeling human again the next day..

In my household, everyone fell ill except for myself. From my six-month-old son to my seventy-year-old grandmother, the entire family was incapacitated by a bout of food poisoning one night, only to act as if nothing had happened the very next day.
It is quite remarkable that three of us experienced identical symptoms within the exact same ten-minute window, between 1:00 and 1:10 AM. It was as if someone simply pressed a button to release a valve and triggered an illness in three people simultaneously.