Mass Fatality Plan

They send us random emails en masse in this country. The emails make my day because hardly anyone emails me. They can range from 'do not gamble or drink alcohol during work hours' to 'the most memorable thing that happened in 2008 was Mr X retiring'. These people have a very weird sense of humour. No wait, they were serious.

We got one today about the Mass Fatality Plan. Now, unless you live in isolation with no means of communication, everyone has heard about Influenza A that's spreading like wildfire around the world. And you would have probably heard about how Cantoland went OTT to lock everyone up. We survived SARS; there was a valid reason why. We isolated infected people to prevent disease spread and scrubbed everything raw.

So this week, there is a new case of a local who came back from the US with it. And just because this is one of their own, they have decided that he was more important than the foreigner who incidentally, was also an imported case, and have declared a state of emergency. Thus we got an email on mass fatality in case of community outbreak. Initially, I thought they were going to lock up the hospitals and anyone who happened to be inside and throw away the key. Then hidden overhead vents will gas us and they will put us into a mass grave they just happened to have conveniently disguised as the swimming pool. Or they may throw our bodies into the construction site of the new wing of the hospital like the indigenous tribes of Borneo used to do to christen their long houses.

My department has our contingency plans ready. We will close all non-essential services. I hope that I will finally have time to read those magazines research papers.