Swine Flu II
Now anyone who goes in the main entrance of a university building, or a school, is greeted by an official in a filtration mask, who takes your temperature aurally, writes down the date and temp on a sticker, and hands the sticker to you. You’re supposed to take your temp twice a day. You have to sign in and out of buildings, so if someone gets sick the authorities can trace all contacts for that day.
A university directive has just shown up in email saying that if you leave Singapore and go to a country with reported cases of H1N1, the days you spend in quarantine on your return count as personal leave. Pity my husband’s colleague who has to go to a conference in Cancun! The U. is likely going to slip budget cuts into flu policies.
No swine flu has shown up here so far; the closest case has been that poor tourist who returned from Mexico to Hong Kong, where he’s in quarantine. But this is an Orange Alert – pretty impressive epidemic tracing apparatus. Not to mention employment for lots of officials to do all this. It will be interesting to see what happens if we get to a Red Alert, or, worst case of all, Black!