It is not a virus at all, I am willing to guess that the people who told you that are probably just trolls who want to discourage people from downloading it, because they don't like it or something dumb like that. I myself was concerned when I first went and downloaded it, because I got a warning saying it could harm my computer, but in the end I decided to go through with the download since I am good at fixing virus problems and have already considered everything I could do incase a virus did strike after download. Never got a virus or anything in the end, just make sure you download it from here, their official website. No need to worry as long as you download it from it's official source and not a third party website!
As another fact I just used the web set up since I do not have a torrent program.