Re: What Questions for CIDRAP Attendees?
Florida1,
You're attending "Benefits and Opportunities of Working with Your Community".
The question I get the most often in community planning meetings in California is this: "Can the federal or state government provide well thought out guidelines for school closures before children bring the pan flu home to their families, thereby worsening pandemic spread?
School closure is one way to slow pandemic spread in the general population. In addition, the immediate population at risk - our children - is the population most vulnerable to cytokine storm and death. How our children fare will determine, I think in large degree, how paniced family members become.
Schools are in the dangerous position of having their funding linked to attendance. In some areas it takes 25 to 30 percent absenteeism for public health to close a school without bankrupting the school budget. There will be great pressure brought to bear in the beginning to keep schools open, so as to continue to secure school funding. There is a long-time pattern for that behavior.
If you run the FluSurge program on the school population of an area, you will see that there will be many deaths and lots of infection spread before schools are closed, if long-standing protocols are followed. In this case not taking action soon enough will be deadly both for the children due to prodromal infection and for the larger population.
FluSurge software:
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15332&highlight=flusurge
Please ask if plans are being made behind the scenes for required school closures in the case of mild, medium, and severe pandemic mortality. If they are not, they should be.