I received an email from our Public Information office late yesterday afternoon: 7 cases of H1N1 have surfaced at our school. With all the conflicting media reports out there (It's a pandemic! It's really nothing to worry about!), I suppose the school is handling the news in the best manner possible. Nobody appears to be freaking out; instead, the administration is encouraging students to quarantine themselves and asking the community at large to do simple things like hand washing, preventative coughing and sneezing (sneeze into your hand or your arm), and staying home if one becomes symptomatic. The last one will be tough for me. I'm that professor that brings a box of tissue to class and lectures with a 101 degree fever. The administration also asked all professors to think about contingency plans for keeping ill students up to speed with coursework. The expectation is that we'll modify any course assignments so that they can be handled digitally, thus limiting contact between infected students and the rest of the campus community. This will be inconvenient, in some cases (how do I handle remote speech assignments? webcam?), but not impossibly so.
As my school is a residential campus--all 2700 students are required to live in residence halls all four years--it should be interesting to see how quickly this thing spreads. In fact, we've been identified as one of the most dangerous infectious disease sites in our county. Score!
Am I being selfish if I admit that I'm more concerned that I might bring home the virus to my 4 year old son than I am about infected college students? When will those vaccines hit the clinics? I want mine yesterday.
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