Blizzard approaching

You know the feeling of anticipation in the air when there's a forecasted blizzard and all the school is a-buzzing with wondering about a snow day? Well, last Thursday was like that, except it was the flu a-comin'.
The first I knew of it was Wednesday night when from the deepest sleep of twenty minutes in, I heard a ringing that turned out to be my cell phone. Gregory got it and I listened to him tell a parent: No he wouldn't wake me up. No, we hadn't heard anything about a school closure. No, I didn't decide if school would be open. He found out then that at around 10:30 at night the government had issued an announcement that primary schools and kindergartens would close early for Easter break because of the flu outbreak.
The flu outbreak: four children had died in the past week. There were 511 cases total of the flu in the Hong Kong schools. (This is out of a population of 7 million people.) This is not the bird flu.
So we went to school. Most classes had only around half of the kids there. Kids dribbled in throughout the day as the parents discovered our school was open. Rumors spread wildly about which international schools were open and who and when the decision would be made if we should close or not.
The long-term staff told us about being in Hong Kong during SARS. The schools were closed for three weeks then and the teachers had to e-mail work to the students, get it back, mark it and come to school every day. Lots of the ex-pat kids and parents flew out of the country for safety; no one was in the streets; Hong Kong felt like a sad ghost town.
But that was then and only 6 kids at our school, out of a school of 1600, were home sick with anything on the Wednesday before. Nevertheless, mid-afternoon the clarification came down from the government that all schools have to close. After being a-quiver all day over the possibility, once the announcement was made, I was exhausted!
So here I am at school with no students for the week before Easter break. And the government just announced today that two of the four kids who died didn't have the flu. An odd sort of gift from the gods.