Just because the current influenza epidemic has been relatively mild doesn’t mean that it will continue to be so. If you want to read something scary, check out this paper by noted flu researcher, John M. Barry. Barry is a distinguished scholar at the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research and author of the award-winning book on the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History .
In the new paper, Barry writes:
The novel H1N1 virus [the current swine flu] seems thus far to be following the pattern of the first three pandemics, and it seems highly likely that it will return in full flower. If the virus is fully adapted to and efficient at infecting humans, this would occur soon, possibly during the influenza season in the southern hemisphere or possibly a few months later in the northern hemisphere. The 1918 and 1957 viruses both exploded in September and October in the northern hemisphere, even though this is not the influenza season….
The most disturbing pieces of information are two:
First, unlike seasonal influenza viruses, novel H1N1 seems to have the ability to bind to cells deep in the lung, which H5N1 does and which the 1918 virus could do.
Second, molecular biology has provided is that, according to scientists at CDC and elsewhere, “genetic markers predictive of adaptation to humans are not currently present in the [H1N1] viruses, suggesting previously unrecognized determinants could be responsible for transmission.” This suggests two things: first, this virus may have other things to teach us; second, we do not know the whole story of how influenza becomes transmissible from human to human, so our monitoring of H5N1 for these markers is incomplete.
Novel H1N1 also lacks genetic markers for virulence identified in the 1918 virus and is expected to remain a mild virus, but this information about transmissibility has unsettling implications.
H5N1 continues to infect and kill people, and Robert Webster, one of the most respected virologists in the world, has expressed concern about a further reassortment of novel H1N1 with H5N1. This is not so far-fetched. A recent laboratory study in which ferrets (the usual animal model for influenza studies) were coinfected with H5N1 and the seasonal H3N2 virus found that a new reassortant virus with genes from both was produced 9 percent of the time.This reassortant was likely much milder than H5N1 itself. (H5N1 is virulent because it binds only to receptors deep inside the lung; other influenza viruses bind to receptors, usually in the upper respiratory tract; the reassortants all were found in the upper respiratory tract.) But given the lethality of H5N1, a reassortant that includes it is frightening. Assuming H1N1 matures to full pandemic status and begins to infect 20 to 40 percent of the population, reassortment with H5N1 is a threat.
Let me translate — the current swine flu, called novel H1N1, is easily transmitted but relatively mild. The same was true in the first waves of past pandemics. But if there is a reassortment, a mixing, of H1N1 with the more lethal but less transmissible avian flu, H5N1, we are in for big trouble. Laboratory experiments with ferrets suggest that the two might mix to combine the transmissibility of one with the lethality of the other.
Don’t be fooled by the mild first wave. The mixing could take place in a second or third season, as it did in 1918.
If this does happen we will have all sorts of things to worry about, but one of them is what we do about education. Despite headlines declaring Swine Flu Should Not Close Most Schools, Federal Officials Say, we may well have to close large numbers of schools. If that happens do we have contingency plans prepared? Do we have plans to provide education even if large numbers of students have to stay at home? Will we have procedures for using phone and internet technologies to disseminate assignments and instruction?
I’m willing to bet that fewer than 10 of the 10,000 school districts in the country have workable emergency plans ready for a deadly flu pandemic. Just look at the school districts around New Orleans. It’s not as if school districts all along the Gulf of Mexico should be surprised that a hurricane might hit and close school for several weeks. It’s likely to happen at least with some districts on a fairly regular basis. And yet none of them had workable plans for how to educate students when the schools closed. They just relied on sending many of those students to other cities outside of the impacted area or leaving them to wander the streets.
But what will happen when schools all over the country are closing because of a deadly flu pandemic? We won’t just be able to send the kids to some other, unaffected city. Let’s hope and pray that it won’t happen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared in case it does.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Do you have a shortage of things to worry about?
Local governments all over the country spend time planning for what to do in the event of a disaster, and schools are no exception. A flu pandemic as bad as what you are suggesting would absolutely constitute such a disaster. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember, but schools used to plan for nuclear attacks back in the day.
In the event of a “deadly” flu pandemic, education necessarily becomes a secondary concern to saving lives. That having been said, too many people are seizing on what happened in 1918 as an example. Don’t forget that public health and hygiene conditions in 1918 were primitive compared to today, with significant portions of America lacking indoor plumbing. You would do well to study the flu panic of 1976, when the government panicked everyone into thinking a pandemic was happening because a few soldiers on a military base got sick.
If you’re seriously concerned about this, and not kjust seizing on something to bloviate about, call your local school district and ask them if they have a COOP plan. COOP stands for “continuity of operations”, and it’s the official government term for how you keep services going in an emergency. The school does not have to let you see the plan (in fact they shouldn’t) but they should at least tell you if they have one.
[…] Originally posted here: Are Schools Prepared for the Flu? […]
Did New Orleans have one? And it’s one thing to have a piece of paper with the word “plan” on it (or say that one has such a piece of paper), and it’s a completely different thing to actually be prepared.
Jay, I don’t know you, so I have no idea if you’re an egomaniac, but do you seriously think that no school officials have thought about this? Tust me, if it’s occurred to you, it’s occurred to the people who are responsible for the safety of our students while they are in school.
And don’t start generalizing from the example of New Orleans. Long before there was a Hurricane Katrina, nobody would have used New Orleans as a model of public planning in *any* area. That would be like judging the snowfighting capacity of America’s cities and towns based on Key West.
And incidentally, if you’re deeply concerned about students missing out on school time, why not focus on the snow issue? There are significant swathes of the country where a quarter-inch of snow is enough to bring entire counties to a standstill, because they’re not used to dealing with it the way northern cities are.
I may well be an egomaniac : ) but I don’t think it is generally safe to assume that a thought has occurred to school officials and been effectively acted-upon just because the thought has occurred to me.
And you make a good point about snow days, but they rarely close schools for weeks or months.
Ah, the angry assertion of competence as a means of diverting attention from examples of incompetence. If the New Orleans school district is an outlier then is Detroit as well?
I think it’s safe to assume that a district that can’t manage it’s finances is a district that can’t manage a pandemic.
In fact, the widespread evidence of managerial incompetence in public education makes questioning the ability of public education administration to deal with an occurrence like a pandemic perfectly appropriate.
Yes, as a matter of fact Detroit *is* an outlier. Or is it just coincidence that we’ve named the two single worst administered major cities in America. In fact, the majority of school districts aren’t located in megacities with bloated school bureaucracies.
It’s easy to spout phrases like “widespread evidence of managerial incompetence in public education” without documentation. Yes, it’s easy to find school districts that fit that description, but there are also many that don’t. In any case, if you haven’t worked in government you probably have no idea of the amount of emergency planning requirements for schools and municipalities that come down from DHS, HHS, and state authorities. Of course, none of those agencies actually talk to each other, so the local communities end up trying to satisfy conflicting requirements while trying to address the community’s needs as only they are positioned to evaluate.
Let me put it another way: When you’ve spent as much time sitting in Emergency Planning meetings as I have, then I will pay more attention to your opinion as informed rather than someone who has spent a total of five minutes pondering the matter.
If you’re looking for “documentation” of “widespread evidence of managerial incompetence in public education,” you could begin with the extensive research literature on how public school systems (and not just those in megacities) squander large amounts of financial resources, which we discuss pretty regularly on this blog, including this post that just went up the other day.
But we could also turn to the expert testimony of someone who knows the field very well. For example, I know of one unparalleled expert in the field who says that “there are significant swathes of the country where a quarter-inch of snow is enough to bring entire counties to a standstill.” What more evidence of widespread managerial incompetence could you ask for? Or do you doubt the credibility of my expert witness?
There’s just one problem with your brilliant comment, Mr. Forster. Public schools in the United States are not tasked with shoveling snow. Nice try though.
Oh, not happy with Detroit and New Orleans?
How about Washington D.C.? No? Maybe Chicago? OK then, how about LAUSD? Seattle? Indianapolis? Miami?
Tell you what, how about you offer up a few examples of the vast bulk of public education administrative organizations that aren’t outliers?
Let me save you the effort of flexing your “experience” muscles because I just don’t care.
I don’t care how many hours you’ve got in the saddle or how many degrees you’ve got or the size of your budget or ego. There’s really only one test and the public education system flunks that test. The occasional exceptions excite no interest among its peers so those isolated outbreaks of competence remain isolated and will continue to remain isolated so long as the current system remains in place.
I expect that should there be a pandemic and the unpreparedness and incompetence of public school officials results in many, needless student deaths you’ll take a page out of your current playbook and blame the kids for getting sick. A lousy workman always blames his tools.
Again, you seem to be wearing a set of blinders that only allows you to see major cities with significant underprivileged populations. Any idiot can tell you that a school district that serves a large proportion of students with unstable home lives is going to have bigger problems than ones that don’t. Maybe you should set foot in a suburb sometime.
You go on to suggest that schools are somehow goign to be responsible for students dying, when the original post was about how to continue education after the schools have been closed to prevent the spread of disease. But I guess it’s probably hard for you to remember what a conversation is about when you don’t listen to what anyone else has to say.
44% of the fourth graders in my state can’t read according to NAEP. I’m glad to hear that solving the problem will be as simple as writing down a plan on paper and having people think about the problem for a change. Maybe lots of meetings would help too.
Let me clarify: I am not at all defending all the policies of public schools, their curricula or the way the educate their students. I am simply saying that if you think the schools don’t spend time and effort planning for what to do in the event of a disaster, you’re uninformed.
No one’s complaining about curricula or the way kids are educated. At least not in this thread. The fact that parents are voting with their children’s feet where the opportunity is available makes the poor educational value of much of the public education system less a complaint then a conclusion.
No, the question at issue is whether it’s reasonable to credit the public education system with the managerial competence to plan for a possible pandemic. In view of the large scale managerial incompetence displayed by so many big-city school districts, where you’d expect to see the cream of the public education managerial crop, it’s a question well worth asking.
One example of the sort of views that might cause the competence of public education administration to be called into question is the conflation of effort expended with results obtained.
No one, other then yourself, gives a damn about the number of hours and the amount of effort you’ve expended in disaster planning just as you wouldn’t give a damn how much time and effort a mechanic put in fixing your car. The only thing that matters is the value of that planning and the only way to ascertain that value is for a disaster to occur and observe the results. The utter incompetence displayed by the New Orleans public education system doesn’t help shore up the reputation of public education management since they did have several *days* at least in which to put plans into effect.
Since we don’t have catastrophic hurricanes showing up with sufficient regularity to draw a baseline we’ve got to look for proxies for managerial competence and those proxies come in the form of the ability to keep buildings repaired, keep supplies in buildings, maintain accurate financial and personnel records. All the mundane but necessary functions of any organization.
The conclusion that any reasonable and unbiased person would draw is that if you can’t get the day-to-day stuff done why should anyone think your plans for how to handle disasters are going to be any better?
“you wouldn’t give a damn how much time and effort a mechanic put in fixing your car”
Now there’s another statement that makes me wonder whether you live in the same society as the rest of us. I don’t know about you, but I absolutely give a damn how much time a mechanic spends on my car – because mechanics charge by the hour for the labor cost! Maybe you don’t own a car or maybe you are so rich that you have accountants who pay for everything, I don’t know. But comments like this paint you as out of touch and call into question the credibility of your views.
Since you are convinced that public school officials are all incompetent, perhaps you would agree with this woman’s lawsuit:
Do you think spending hours and expending effort should matter or are results more important?
The two aren’t the same you know. At least outside the hothouse atmosphere of the public education system.
As to who’s out of touch, I’ll just point out that there’s charter school law in forty-four states with many of them wrangling over the expansion of the inevitable cap.
I’d say the person who’s out of touch, and necessarily so being an apologist for the district model of public education, is you not that I have any illusions about you engaging in any introspection.
Oh yeah, the comment software is pretty confusing on your blog, Jay.
I’m not an apologist for anything. It would probably shock you, allen, to know that I am a strong supporter of charter schools. Competition makes everything better and so does consumer choice.
That’s nice but let’s not stray too far from the issue which is doubts about the ability of public education administration to handle the planning for an event like a pandemic when it’s quite clear that many such administrations don’t do a particularly good job of managing the mundane, day-to-day tasks.