Korea and mortality

I don't know what it's like over in North America, but here people are completely freaking out about H1N1 (a.k.a. swine flu). The students at my school have their temperatures taken several times a day, and if they have even the slightest fever they are immediately sent home. Apparently this wasn't enough to give any advance notice when one of my students, Erica, actually contracted H1N1. I saw her in class the day before she was confirmed to have the virus, and she looked fine. She was sent home for two weeks, and her classmates (and their siblings and the class' main teacher) were not allowed to attend for a week. The parents of the school's other children flipped out. Many pulled their kids out of my school for a week to a month. Some have yet to come back and may not ever do so. Meanwhile, Erica is back and doing well. She says that H1N1 felt basically like a cold. Her mom gave us a 'sorry my kid got swine flu' cake (cakes being the appropriate gift for any occasion here). I don't mind kids being pulled out of classes (it actually makes the wilder classes far more manageable). However, I do mind that half the festivals in Korea have been canceled due to swine flu paranoia. This coming weekend I wanted to go to an international martial arts festival, which I chose over the Seoul fireworks festival and a traditional dance festival, but all three have been canceled. The weekend after that is Chuseok, sometimes called Korean Thanksgiving, and I had a five day plan that involved going to a lantern festival and a mask festival--both of which looked awesome and both of which are canceled, so I'm back at square one for planning for that five day weekend. I can't leave the country because Will is the only foreign teacher who got permission to do so and he will be forced to stay home from work for a week afterwards as quarantine, even though he is going to Japan, which has the same rate of infection as Korea.

I find the whole thing ridiculous. H1N1 isn't nearly as dangerous as, say, being on or near a street in Korea since a significant portion of Koreans have a complete lack of regard for the rules of the road. Yesterday my class all ran to the window when they heard an ambulance siren. A delivery man on a motorcycle had apparently (as witnessed by New Lindsay at street level) been hit by a car (both parties having been speeding, and presumably at least one was running a red light) and his helmet-less head dented the car. It looked like his neck was broken. At any rate, he wasn't moving, he was in a neck brace, and people were running around the street screaming. This is the second time this summer that I've looked out the window and seen a motor cycle delivery guy lying on the road in that intersection (which isn't all that dangerous or busy from an infrastructure point of view). The last time the guy was lying bloody in the street, but at least he was moving of his own volition. His bike was about thirty meters down the road [side note: motorcycles are here known as 'autobikes' or 'autobi'. Also, mechanical pencils are called 'sharps' and cell phones are 'hand phones,' pronounced 'han-deu po-ne'. I'm fascinated by the use of English words for things that have different names in English]. Anyway, that's my rant about how festivals shouldn't be canceled for H1N1 any more than they should be canceled for Koreans ignoring traffic laws.