As an English teacher at a 6,000-strong middle school in the northwest of Hunan province, I come into contact with several hundred students a day. My course load puts me in front of roughly 850 students a week. In a school as cramped as mine, the students and staff are constantly breathing each other’s germs. As such, when I started to get a deep-lung cough and run a mild fever, I should have known it was only a matter of time before the surgical-mask brigade descended on our school.
Tuesday, October 26th, after about a week of classrooms full of hacking, coughing, sniffling teenagers, I walked into my first period to find 40% of my class wearing surgical masks. The next day, the school closed down for a week due to the diagnosis of swine flu in several students and one teacher. That’s right: we got the piggy.
H1N1 has become a pandemic, so much so that it’s now considered to be “the dominant flu strain in the world today,” according to an article at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The article gives a good overview of the implications and complications of swine flu and the panic surrounding it. The US government’s website about the flu provides statistical evidence that backs up the RFE/RL article. The World Health Organization has an FAQ about the pandemic.