Another Pandemic-Like Episode?: TB to 2008

Going through this current crisis with COVID-19, I was reminded the other day of a slightly similar, though definitely not as deadly nor critical, that happened my last year at SSVC when I was superintendent.

It happened just after Christmas, 2008. We had restarted school after the Christmas break, the students were back, and we were preparing for semester exams. We had had some flu cases earlier in the year, but nothing our nurses and houseparents couldn't handle. This time it was different.

I don't know how or why it happened - maybe it came back with the students when they returned from their homes scattered across the state - but it hit the school hard. Normally, a sick child would be kept in the cottage during the day away from the school and other students. If there was a risk of spreading it to others, the child would be kept in the campus hospital.

The hospital was more of a clinic, with a nurse on duty 24 hours a day. It had a few beds, but its main function was to distribute medications to the 300 students who had prescriptions or needed something for whatever cold or pain they had. It definitely was not equipped for treating a flu epidemic. But that's what it did in January 2009.

We had to put beds in rooms that were originally meeting rooms or equipment storage rooms. Then we began to move beds into the hallways, just like I saw on TV recently. Many of our administrative personnel who were co-located in the clinic were enlisted to assist the nurses in many of the housekeeping chores. Some children were taken home by their parents, but that was the exception since almost all of them lived in either the Philadelphia, Harrisburg, or Pittsburgh areas, and those areas were dealing with similar illnesses.

We survived. After about three weeks, we returned to a situation where the nurses could handle things on their own with help from the houseparents. But it was close for a while. We had some great staff and kids. 

I think about it oftern these days.