There was recently a H1N1 flu case in my company. Immediately it was announced and we had to stop working right away and go to the hospital to do tests to see if any employee was infected. When we went back to the office, we had to disinfect our hands with alcohol at the building entrance, we had to gargle a liquid that tasted like betadine that is supposed to help to kill any virus that could have gotten into our moth/throat and we had to wear a mask. When we entered our office space there was people disinfecting our furniture, computers, telephones, windows and even the walls. We also had some new gadgets in the rooms; the president urgently bought some huge ion generators with a special button that when pressed is supposed to clean the air and kill viruses.
Everybody wearing a mask, smelling like disinfectant and the noise of ion generators on the background; that was the work atmosphere for more than a week until the president lowered the emergency status and we could work again without covering half of our faces.
8 days later the flu virus victim came back to work. As soon as he arrived, before we could even ask him how he was, he bowed to everybody and he told us:
“I am very sorry for having caused you such big inconvenience, trouble, nuisance and for getting you worried.”
Notice that from his perspective, he is NOT a victim, he is the culprit of having caused so much trouble to the company: because he couldn’t work for one week and we had to wear a mask and worry about our health.
The head patch was optional, I don’t really know if it’s useful if you are not ill but Yamamoto-san and Yamazaki-san were wearing it during the whole week.
The gargle liquid
A secretary disinfecting my keyboard.
Try to look for somebody without a mask.
Washing hands with alcohol.
Picture of last year Japan swine flu panic.
10 replies on “H1N1 flu in my company”
Yeah, I think I got H1N1 week ago. The fever went away in a few days but I’m still having bad headaches.
That’s surprisingly cautious, if it were like that everywhere, this wouldn’t be a pandemic.
It’s not that bad here at TokyoTech. A professor told us that there has been 200 infections on our campus, but only about 10% of the people are running around with masks. There are these desinfectants everywhere, though.
That’s a little over the top..
Why does that guy look like a tomato in the first picture?
That is way over the top. These people are way to paranoid.
Had you and your colleagues already gotten then H1N1 vaccine?
These are amazing precautions. I’d love to know what you gargled.
what’s the head patch supposed to do? soak up your sweat?
It’s no more lethal than the regular annual flu, for god’s sakes. Statistics do not make good media copy though, do they? Those ‘disinfectants’ are more of a threat on a statistical level.
It’s all about medical corporations making their money. The same as it was with previous bird’s flues. Poor people.
Dumb.
Those masks have only been ever so slightly proven to keep people from spreading the disease, there is nothing showing that they will keep you from getting the flu or anything else.
The culture of paranoia, especially pertaining to medical issues, in Japan has always annoyed the hell out of me. As a person with Type 1 (Juvenile Onset) Diabetes, I’ve found it much less of a hassle and social hurdle to just not inform people of my condition, even though it would be prudent to. The retardation of proactive and intelligent thought on these issues through top down decrees like this is absolutely mind numbing.
I may be a bit hyperbolic in these descriptions but it is disturbing nonetheless.