The Dreaded Announcement

After school today there was an announcement for all faculty to meet for an impromptu faculty meeting. We all knew what it was about before we got there: H1N1. We have one confirmed case with a home student and five dorm students were tested today. We won't know until Friday if they have the virus or not. There have been 30+ students on the absence list each of the last three days. The local doctor is concerned that some of these kids have the virus and didn't report it. In a normal school setting if the number of cases reaches the limit, the school would be shut down for a week and everyone isolated. How do you do that at a boarding school? To shut school means all the kids are isolated together and the dorm staff are overloaded with the care that needs to be administered. And by now if there is swine flu in the dorm, they are all exposed. We will now play the waiting game - the test results come back Friday. The school is considering a 4 day weekend of mandated rest, but this still doesn't help out the dorm staff. So the school is asking for folks willing to take a chance by going to help in the dorms. Any staff women who are pregnant have been banned from campus, as have folks with ongoing respiratory disorders. For the rest of us, it will be business as usual but with LOTS of hand washing and coughing in the elbow rather than on our hands.