The doctor on the “Today” show says it’s not an epidemic. Sure, a lot of people are sick, everywhere, but it is not an epidemic, he reassures me,home with the flu,and the rest of the early morning TV audience. But Matt Lauer fights back, insisting the flu, which seems to have hit everyone, must be of epidemic proportions. The doctor calmly says, no, it’s the media with a slow news week that’s taken one too many photos of a hospital emergency room, with wheezing, hacking, puking people, making it appear like it’s an epidemic.
OK. So maybe it’s not an epidemic, but just about everyone I’ve talked to has been sick. Even my fellow journalists. The woman who sits next to me sounds awful. She just got over the nasty flu, sort of,she’s got a hacking cough but doesn’t like the taste of cough medicine. She was part of the “S Squad” as my editor called it, staffers Sherri, Sandi and Susan, who were out sick this week.
Out and about in OC, the stories were the same. Lots of people sick. Some working at home with a laptop, others down for the count. But despite the number of people out sick, business rocked on.
“Pretty much the whole building was ransacked by it,” said Crishana Haynes at Oakley Inc., the Foothill Ranch-based sunglasses manufacturer. It seemed as though there were two types of the flu, the “throw-up” flu and the “flu” flu, she said. And “then you get all the gory details when they come back.” The throw-up flu, of course, keeps you locked up in the bathroom and the flu flu is the typical aching, sore-throat number that makes you feel like you’ve been in the ring with Mike Tyson.
“So what did you do?”
I asked if they had to call in replacements. Nope. “Everyone was pretty forgiving,” Haynes said. And those who could worked at home.
Pursuing my unrelenting flu-bug story, I talk to a secretary at L.H. Friend, Weinress, Frankson & Presson in Irvine to find out how the flu bug affects stock brokering. I asked for the CEO.
“How do you know he’s been sick?” the secretary asked.
“I don’t,” I said. I explained I’m just randomly calling
He’s sick, she said, but he’s not out, just out of the office on an appointment. The brokerage business stands. But don’t shake his hand.
OC’s largest hotel, Hilton Anaheim and Towers, lost its executive chef for a few days. But it fought back with the next best thing: the executive sous chef. Other departments were struck, too, said spokesman Patrick Hynes. So the Hilton called in its part-time team and some of its healthy employees ran up a little overtime.
Cathi Douglas, the PR director at Chapman University in Orange, said her son broke his thumb rollerblading, then she had the awful task of bringing him to the flu-infested emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital, where she said everyone was sick. But fortunately, both mother and son have immune systems of steel and neither got the virus. In fact, the public relations office at Chapman should be a biological study because none of the employees there have been sick. Ruth Wardwell, news director at Chapman, said the only time she got the flu was when she got the shot.
Manpower Temporary Services, Irvine, has been battling its own flu outbreak while assisting its customers in need of flu-replacement workers. The biggest demand was over New Year’s and the week after, said area manager Sue Foigelman. But recently, there have been relapse cases. People have been very sick, stay at home, begin to feel better, go back to work and then have a relapse, she said. But over all, it looks as though the flu virus has run its course, she said.
But listening to the hacking in the newsroom, I wonder.
And as you might expect, the surfing dudes at Huntington Surf & Sport have been doing just fine. No outages there. “We’re just chillin’,” said Mike.
So there it is. This story would have been longer and grosser but, unfortunately, I was a member of the “S Squad.”
