I wasn’t going to post again so quickly about the flu, but changed my mind after realizing that I have H1N1-related meetings* on my calendar on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. In what follows, I assume that your campus is relatively healthy, though of course that might well not be true.
If you have not been to the CDC’s web page offering guidance for responding to the flu at institutions of higher ed, visiting that would be job 1. The basic advice is to practice good hygiene, and to make it easy for people who feel sick to stay home.
Herewith, some pointers about getting through this flu season:
- Give yourself permission to be sick, and if you are sick, to stay home. Many academics are remarkably driven people, reluctant to pull away altogether from their work. (He said, as he typed in the wee hours of the morning.) And lots of us will try to power through if we’re under the weather. But a pandemic is different. You need to stay home, not only so that you can fight off the disease, but so you can slow its spread.
- If you have a chronic disease or condition (such as but not only diabetes, asthma, other heart or lung conditions, etc.), or if you are pregnant, consult your doctor about how to plan for flu. At what level of campus outbreak should you stay away?
- Adjust attendance policies. One small thing you can do is to not require doctor’s notes to document student’s absences. Though some students will abuse it, it’s best to trust the judgment of your students. Both university and private health care providers may well be overwhelmed with demand–give them a break.
- The Chronicle reports today that students ignore official proclamations about safety, and over-estimate their own safety. Benjamin Chapman, cited in the article, suggests “be creative, communicate through social-networking sites, and lose the scientific jargon and polite euphemisms.”
- Get students in the habit now of checking for information online. That way, if they’re sick, or if you are, they already know where to go. If you wait until you’re sick, for example, to send out an announcement about a site you’ve prepared, you risk confusing students, or having to deal with troubleshooting when you’re feverish.
- Especially if you teach in multiple classrooms, wipe down your desk, table, or podium before class. You might wipe down the screen of the computer at your classrooms’ teaching stations. Though it’s not environmentally correct, consider packing some Lysol-type wipes in your bag.
- Relatedly, carry your own office supplies–for example, whiteboard markers, or a mini-stapler, or others.
- Yes, it will ruin your skin, but use the %&#*! Purell.
- Be observant, and don’t be shy about feeding your campus health services information. Collectively, faculty, staff, and students know a campus better, and in more detail, than the campus physician possibly can. Although one naturally tends to defer to medical expertise in a health emergency, in this case what needs to happen is that medical expertise needs to be translated into a local context, and you have a role to play in that.
- Consider getting the vaccine.
- Where possible, go paperless.
Fear-mongering won’t help anyone, but neither will pretending that H1N1 doesn’t matter, just because it hasn’t rivaled the 1918 flu epidemic’s mortality rates yet.
How do you plan to cope with the flu this year?
Image: by flickr user kodomut, under a CC license
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10 Responses to Hacking the Flu
Matt Thomas - September 17, 2009 at 3:19 pm
You forgot one. It may seem obvious, but wash your hands.
Jason B. Jones - September 17, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Fair enough–I was mentally including that under “use the Purell.”
Nels P. Highberg - September 17, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Purell, based on some studies, is less effective than hand washing because it kind of shields the virus from spreading but doesn’t kill it (since Purell is antibacterial, which really doesn’t do a lot for viruses). Not saying I don’t have a bottle of it on my desk, but I know a lot of medically-oriented people who won’t touch Purell because they think of it as false hope. I think it works, just in different ways.
I am someone who never has a problem canceling class if I’m the list bit ill, so I will do that without hesitation.
I’m having my students write about H1N1 for their first major assignment, which is freaking them out, but we’re having great conversations. So another tip might be, when relevant, talk about H1N1 in class. Since I’ve taught classes on virus narratives in the past, that might be more relevant for me.
Matt Thomas - September 17, 2009 at 4:02 pm
The studies I’ve seen seem to suggest alcohol-based hand sanitizers, while better than nothing, aren’t as effective as good old soap and water, even if people have started equating the two. The NYT article I linked to in my initial comment really got my attention as a number of my students this semester have come down with H1N1. I, however, remain flu-free, partly because, I like to imagine, I wash my hands a lot.
Billie - September 17, 2009 at 8:10 pm
In a class yesterday, students were writing on their blogs. We played a version of “musical computers” where students moved three spaces to the left and wrote something on that person’s blog . . . then moved five spaces to the left to write on a third person’s blog before returning to their original computer station. When they returned home, I noted that almost all of them pulled out hand sanitizer (gel) or wipes. They were washing their hands after touching others’ keyboards. I never considered having hand sanitizer available to them.
I agree with Matt, though. Hand washing is best . . . but in the case of my students, hand sanitizer and wipes were a quick solution to the problem. Many of them, I noted, went to the restroom after class to wash their hands.
Hand sanitizer is now a staple in my bag.
David - September 18, 2009 at 1:35 pm
And a follow-up comment.
I keep seeing letters to faculty regarding H1N1 with wording like this: “In order to follow these directives, you will need to be more flexible in classroom attendance policies than you are in typical semesters. We don’t want sick students attending class because they fear the effect on their final grades. It is appropriate to advise students of this situation at the beginning of the semester, and encourage them avoid absences for reasons other than illness. It is also likely that some students may take advantage of laxer standards. However, the public health benefit of encouraging sick students to stay home outweighs the importance of requiring class attendance.”
There are no similar statements of flexibility with regard to staff. There seem to be no efforts underway to expand the number of sick days at our disposal or to just allow us to stay home with with pay with no questions asked if we say we have flu symptoms. I’m a new employee at my university, so I have accrued 7 hours of leave time. If I am concerned that I might have H1N1, then I can take one day off and after that I’ll have to go on unpaid leave. In other words, if I get the flu, I’m going to work anyway because I can’t afford to do otherwise.
David - September 18, 2009 at 12:51 pm
I’m wondering what institutions are doing for staff with regard to H1N1. At my current institution, there is a policy in place encouraging more leniency in attendance policies for students and encouraging faculty to stay home if they are feeling sick. Staff are also encouraged to stay home if we’re sick, but the policy simply states that we are allowed to use our accrued sick time when we are ill. I am just struck at how universities are bending over backwards to be flexible for students and faculty, but so far as I can tell, the policy for staff is completely unchanged from any other time.
Jason B. Jones - September 18, 2009 at 2:08 pm
David, these are totally fair questions. At some campuses, it’s probably easier to get staff to take certain steps than it is to get faculty to do them, but at all campuses it’s important to work with staff. A couple of points:
At most schools, the exact response depends on the extent of the local outbreak. For example, at the moment our campus is relatively healthy, and so there are no special precautions, others than managers buying lots of Lysol wipes and Purell. If there were a more significant outbreak here, then different arrangements might come into play.
If you are sick, and you come to work, you might consider wearing a mask. A person with the flu, without a mask, risks contaminating those within a 6-foot radius. Wearing a mask reduces that zone of contamination to less than a foot. (Says our campus doctor, who’s following the CDC on this.)
You might also talk to your supervisor about the possibilities of job-swapping. For example, maybe you’re too contagious to work a high-foot-traffic area, but you could work a phone.
You might also call HR–or ask your supervisor–to call HR and ask for guidance about staff under these conditions. Institutions vary so widely about this. Because I teach at a public, unionized university, there’s been pretty elaborate communication made available to faculty and staff about these issue.
And, look, some people who are sick really need to work. That’s the unfortunate reality of it. If you can’t stay home, you can’t stay home. People can only do what they’re able to do.
Tria - September 22, 2009 at 9:58 am
On my first class day, I like to have an exercise where students stand in two lines to introduce themselves to each other–one line moves while the other line stands still, and half the class meets half the class. This year, I told everyone not to shake hands because I wanted to be cautious about the flu. At this, one student, who is a nurse, shouted “Thank you!”
Jason B. Jones - September 19, 2009 at 8:38 am
Amusing to note that my wife received an invitation to a “hands-on workshop” on swine flu school planning. Probably not the cliche they wanted in this context.