H1N1 flu will go “back to school”

The H1N1 flu (formerly called swine flu) has not been on summer vacation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that influenza activity is higher than normal for this time of year, and 98 percent of positive influenza A tests reported to the CDC last week were H1N1.

But when about 55 million students return to school this fall, a notable spike in cases is expected. Earlier this week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the flu could disrupt learning and he urged schools to be prepared to accommodate sick students by offering printed packets of learning material and classroom lectures on DVD or podcasts. Health insurance companies are poised to implement pandemic plans.

But federal officials don’t want a repeat of last spring, when hundreds of schools closed due to a small number of real and/or suspected cases. The federal government says that students and teachers can return to school 24 hours after a fever is gone. Yet the CDC says this: “People infected with seasonal and novel H1N1 flu shed virus and may be able to infect others from one day before getting sick to five to seven days after.”

So someone can be contagious for a week! Prevention is our only hope of containing outbreaks. Ideally, a sick person stays at home until they’re feeling significantly better. If everyone did that we could contain outbreaks.

But we all know it doesn’t work that way. Who hasn’t sat next to a sick coworker, fuming at their insensitivity for others’ well-being by coming to work and sneezing and complaining all day and touching doorknobs? And some have the nerve to act like martyrs for doing so: They see themselves as loyal workers who came in despite their flu.

And who hasn’t seen a clearly suffering child dropped off at school because his parents decided they couldn’t take a day off?

H1N1 prevention will be about self-sacrifice. It’s about burning through your sick days to stay in bed, or using vacation days to care for children, thereby sparing the rest of us.