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Boston Declares Health Emergency Due To Massive Flu Outbreak
skade88 writes "Boston has seen 10 times more flu cases this year than last. They are now up to 700 cases and counting, with 18 deaths in the city. The city of Boston has declared a public health emergency in the wake of the epidemic. 'The CDC said the proportion of people visiting health care providers with flu-like symptoms climbed from 2.8 percent to 5.6 percent in four weeks. By contrast, the rate peaked at only 2.2 percent during the relatively mild 2011-2012 flu season. The estimated rate of flu-related hospitalizations in the U.S. was 8.1 per 100,000 people, which is high for this time of year, according to Dr. Joe Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch of the CDC’s influenza division. The agency’s next advisory will be issued Friday.' As previously discussed on Slashdot it would also be nice for your friends and coworkers for you to stay home if you are sick."
Beep wrong answer in America...
Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave. Honestly, it is what it is, and this what Americans want. Hence this is what America gets.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
It's fairly simple. When employers insist that you need to go to a doctor when you are sick and get proof or they won't believe that you were, then people decide "if I have to go out anyway, I may as well go to work."
Also, when one person in an office is very sick, then they get a lot of negative attention. If it spreads and a number of people get sick, then they were one of the unlucky ones.
I used to stay home when sick, until I had a manager who told me that if I took any more time off I would probably lose my job. So when I next got the flu I took drugs and went to work. I can tell you though, I really enjoyed my lengthy closed door meeting with him and HR that day. I don't think they were happy I scheduled that meeting.
Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.
Which strains were in this year's vaccine?
Oops, answered my own question:
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm315365.htm
Based on that information and the recommendations of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the strains selected for inclusion in the 2012-2013 flu vaccines are:
A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus
A/Victoria/361/2011 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Wisconsin/1/2010-like virus.
"many" does not imply policy. I have American friends and lived there for a while. The problem is that folks want to earn a living and either they take it from their vacation (which people do not want to do) or they just come to work and hide it as best as they can.
I find your comment quite odd on how society deals with a problem. They punish, instead of just changing policy into a better policy. Either way there are society costs. At least with sick paid leave people will be assured that they can continue to earn a living.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
But by default you won't be paid if you stay home, so there's still an incentive to try to come in and hide it if you feel you're at all on the borderline, and to come back as soon as you no longer look visibly sick (even if you're still contagious).
Some employers do give their employees a certain number of sick days to reduce that incentive, but labor law in most states doesn't require it, and many employers don't. For example, neither Starbucks nor McDonald's offer sick days to their retail workers. Oddly, they do offer sick days to their non-retail workers (office employees, e.g. accountants, managers, etc.), despite those employees not being customer-facing. Perhaps they care about whether corporate HQ is sick more than whether customers get sick. :P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How are they forcing companies to do that?
I think you mean these companies like to use that as an excuse to save a couple bucks on what used to be a normal part of compensation. Everything will have some level of abuse, the ideal is to keep it to a minimum you will never not have it. It sure is a convenient excuse to screw the rest of the workers though.
While the CDC does not keep a tab of deaths overall from the flu, it estimates that 24,000 Americans die each year.
Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?
You can make policy without hard numbers, but you will never know if the policy is effective.
Huh.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
...
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
...
I am an American
Are you sure?
By the way, many companies will punish you for coming to work sick now
That is easily the strangest thing I've ever heard. I've literally never heard of such a thing in all my decades.
I think we're more likely to see the Republicans convert en mass to Islam or we'll see Karl Marx carved into mt rushmore before any american company will try to increase sick days taken. Its just too easy of a metric to grade "resources" and their supervisors.
I really have to point out, that having had the actual real flu in the past, if you have it, you'll be so sick there is no way you'll make it to work unless you're Hercules himself. If you're physically able to go to work, trust me, its almost certain you just have a minor cold or a minor cough or at most a weak case of walking pneumonia. If your only symptom is you have a slightly stuffy nose, thats a cold, not the flu. When your fever is 103+ and you feel like you can barely get out of bed and you feel like you're about to cough out a lung, now thats the start of the flu.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oh yes, the doctor's note. Well isn't THAT just a wonderful thing to go get. Let's take a look at my options:
1. Lie in bed, eat some nyquil and chicken noodle soup, and sleep the sickness away to let your body heal.
2. Sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, surrounded by dozens of people sick with everything under the sun while you're immune system is compromised, only to have a doctor look at you for 3 seconds, tell you you have a cold or whatever, followed by paying $30 for the doctor's note. After that, I can go home after essentially putting in the equivelant hours of a full day's work surrounded by sick people, get nowhere even remotely close to enough sleep and rest to heal, and be 10 times as sick due to the dozen other things I caught.
Yeah, option 2 sounds awesome, thanks workplace.
5 sick days? Jeeebus.
Granted, I'm a small business, but I'll give any employee whatever time they damn well need to not look like shit in my office and probably make the problem worse by infecting others.
Hell, even for lower grade stuff, I'd still rather you got some rest for a day or two instead a week spent int he office delivering subpar work.
It's more cost effective for me in the long run to provide sane sick leave instead squeezing the ju-uice. Being a boss with a shred of humanity is just icing on the cake.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I ran into this too when I went to work for a large networking company in Silicon Valley (competitor to Cisco). Anyway, after I joined I learned that they combined their sick leave and vacation pay and as it was the vacation was not all that generous. Of course the first thing that happens is I get the cold from hell. Next I find out that they have mandatory vacation days which were at odds with some trips I had planned and paid for long before I started working there (and told them about up front). Needless to say, I was happy to leave there over that and numerous other bonehead policies. They mandated that everyone take the week off of the 4th of July (3 days of vacation wasted) as well as the week of Labor Day (4 more days of vacation wasted).
Many other large companies also do not offer sick leave, even food chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Yes they do. we see every time. Make Accurate predictions based on how close it matches the virus. We can make predictions basde on uptake.
Any one who says the data doesn't support the vaccine is an idiot or a liar. That data is pretty well documented.
Is it perfect? no, it's not 100%, yet.
Gary NUll is an idiot. as an example:
"since the hype and subsequent fizzle of the H1N1 scare in 2008, "
Fizzle? mahny people died, hospitals around the coutry were running out of beds. They ONLY thiing that saved it from disaster was the distribtution and uptake of the vaccine.
But since disaster was averted, clearly is wasn't needs. That Gary Null's idiotic logic.
The post is full of out of context, and cherry picked data.
He is a SCAM idiot that has been cherry picking and lying about data and medicine for 40 years. And it's always been the same crap, never changing, never showing good data.
He does what he says others do, and he should be thrown in prison for malpractice, but since he is a SCAM practitioner, for some reason he is immune from liability when his advice kills people.
There are people dead from treatable disease because of this guy, and other selfish, and evil people like him.
And when I say evil I mean will take money from dying people for nonsense advice. Then the people die.
He preys on the vulnerable and naive.
He is an AIDS denialist.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sound like you have hypochondria. Take two placebos and call me maybe.
rewriting history since 2109
Flu shots are mandated for clinical staff by most if not all of the Boston hospitals, and there are a huge number of them - I've counted 11 so far, and I think I'm probably missing one or two:
Childrens, MGH, Brigham & Womens, Faulkner, Beth Israel, Tufts Medical Center, Spaulding Rehab, Shriners, Mass Eye&Ear, New England Baptist, Veterans Administration Boston...and those are just the ones that are actually in Boston proper.
Honestly, I think hospitals are part of the problem. They focus illness and weak populations (same with nursing homes and assisted living facilities.) Also, there tends to be huge pressure on clinical staff to report for work even when sick. The medical profession is astoundingly arrogant when it comes to not doing harm to patients...another good example would be the sloppy handwriting doctors use when filling out prescriptions, injuring or killing thousands.
Please help metamoderate.
Big deal, the Germans get 4-5 weeks of paid vacation (4 weeks minimum by law). Their economy seems to be doing OK despite that. In Denmark it's 25 days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country
The US employer style seems to be burn out your employees, then discard them. Might work fine for low end jobs that require little training and investment. It may well be that most of these low training low end jobs will be taken over by robots and other automation in the future.
Whatever it is, not having paid sick leave is a big health issue. If more people quarantined themselves when diseases made them feel miserable and reduced the spreading of those diseases, that would make those diseases less likely to make people so miserable, whether because they spread less, or because they evolve to be less nasty.