A Community Health employee cleans the hand rails at the Sandy Hill Community Health centre which opened a flu assessment clinic to help reduce the pressures on emergency rooms in Ottawa yesterday. Health Minister Deb Matthews says Ontario will run out of the regular swine flu vaccine by the end of the week.
The first client to be assessed happened to be in the Centre for non-flu related reasons before the fun officiallly started, but was pulled into see a doctor by staff. He sat coughing by himself in the “contaminated” waiting room – the masks went on before the lights did. There were no long lines at the door, just a few regulars confused by the change in hours. One lonely coughing client and 30 people in infection control gowns and vinyl gloves. The beginning.
I worked the door for the afternoon, and was the first stop for all visitors, sick or not. Four staff to manage a client flow of maximum 2-3 people at a time. We had stickers to give the kids who fussed over the masks. The halloween candy was co-opted by staff looking for a midday snack.
No hitches to speak of, but the masks were met with some suspicion. What’s so scary about a mask? The mask became a symbol of disease, and many people wanted to distance themselves from the idea of a pandemic. “I’m just here to see my doctor” was a common excuse to try to slip by without being screened. Clients linked the vaccine to a world government conspiracy, and hand sanitizer was talked about as a corporate money grab that would weaken the flock. These themes came up often enough to be a trend. Lots of speculation about a dystopian future ”where one day we will all be wearing masks.” Just like Orwell said we would…
None of this mattered, though, because wearing a mask makes you feel brave enough to assert with absolute conviction that no one is coming in without a purel spritz. Simple! And as much as the mask is not a great look aesthetically, just put the darn thing and be pacified.
Our first day provided a very small number of nasty coughs and a very large number of concerned asymptomatics (mostly parents with children). In a real life way, there doesn’t need to be a flu assessment centre. The imagination of this flu far surpasses the ground-level viral effects. This whole exercise is to keep people who aren’t sick enough to need treatment from clogging hospital emergency rooms.
A common refrain: ”Does your child have a cough? Does your child have a fever? No? Then why are you bringing them the city’s locus of sick?”
Apart from having no idea how to properly take off my PPE (the scary masks, gowns and gloves) and likely contaminating myself, day one went a-ok.
