Question for you.
Has anyone had a child visit your church who was diagnosed a day or two later to have Swine Flu?
If so, what did you do? What did you communicate to the parents of children who attended the same room of the infected child? I’ve noticed that Swine Flu has been going around and I wanted to get this information out to those who might need it.
We have not had this happen yet, but a very large church in our community did during VBS. They sent letters home with all of the children, not just those in the classroom. They didn’t need to worry too much about getting the word out, because even in this large Tampa Bay market, it was all over the news. The word spread even faster on Facebook. That’s actually how I found out the day it happened.
Also, they were prroactive and sent communication home before the test results were in, but based on being a “suspected” case.
From what I hear, the sanitation process was pretty intense as well. If I can get my hands on the letter, I’ll send it to you.
We had a child in our children’s program on a Sunday and became ill on Monday and by Friday had been diagnosed with Swine Flu. We called our local health department to see if we needed to do anything outside of our normal cleaning or notify our body. They said that we should follow our normal cleaning policy and if we sent anything to our congregation to send them a reminder not to bring their child(ren) to church if there are signs of illness and cleaniness habits. We posted this on our website.
The health department said that they are not “overdoing” on notification. Doctors and not sending in samples for testing because the strain of flu right now is this particular one.
I’d love to check out that letter from the church near Donna – if she can get her hands on it.
There’s a fine balance between notification and causing panic.
This is a great thing for all of us to think about, Kenny. Thanks for the post.
.-= Anthony Prince´s last blog ..How Did He Get Here?! (and who IS this person?) =-.
We just had it happen in our children’s church. I called the CDC to find out what we should do. He was confirmed with H1N1. They told us we would know within 2-4 days if anyone else would have it. Regular cleaning should take care of the virus, which cannot live on surfaces after 8 hours. I wnet ahead and wiped down everything with Clorox wipes just for other’s peace of mind. We were notified by phone, email and facebook so many of our parents had heard. We gave our leadership all the info in case they were questioned, used our phone tree to notify all in our congregation and printed out info from the CDC website to keep at our children’s check-in center. The children are to stay away from others 24 hours after their fever breaks. This child has 2 other siblings who did not catch it. I hear it will be very rampant this fall, and mainly the press has made it more scary than it has been so far.