Paranoia: City ERs Flooded With Swine Flu Fears

NEW YORK [CBS] — New Yorkers were able to breathe a breath of fresh air Friday when Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there were no new confirmed cases of the swine flu, or what officials calling the H1N1 virus. Yet plenty of people are still afraid the virus is spreading, causing a paranoia that’s clogging up the system at local hospitals.

During an afternoon news conference, Bloomberg and City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said those who had come down with the swine flu in New York City were on the mend and probable cases appear to have only minor flu symptoms.

“What we’re reassured by is we haven’t seen severe illness. That is what we had been very concerned about. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but it’s reassuring a week in that we haven’t seen a single case of severe illness with flu,” said Frieden. “But we do expect to see it continue spreading in the community.”

That expectation has blossomed into widespread concern. Parents have been flooding local emergency rooms with their children, paranoid that they may have contracted the swine flu.

“Obviously, please, don’t go to the hospital unless you are seriously ill. All that’s likely is that you’re going to clog the system and you may very well infect other people,” said Bloomberg.

Dr. Andrew Racine of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore says the hospital is seeing 30 percent more patients since the swine flu outbreak. He says many of the children have fevers, allergy symptoms, or minor ailments that don’t require hospital visits. The result is long waits which is problematic for patients who really need medical attention.

“There are some people who are bringing in their children who might not be ill, but are sitting next to someone who might be ill, but are sitting next to someone who might be. And then three days from now or four days from now that child actually will be ill,” said Racine. “It’s not just parents who are reacting, it’s institutions like schools and daycare centers and workplaces all of whom think, ‘Oh my goodness, we have to have children before they come back to school,’ which is not the case.”

St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, which is where the outbreak first hit and has seen the most cases, will open back up for students on Monday after being closed all week. Nearby PS 177, also hit by the outbreak, returns on Wednesday.

Though the city is urging everyone to maintain their normal routine, stressing there’s no reason to avoid travel to New York City, organizers for the Cinco de Mayo festival in Queens have decided to postpone this weekend’s event.

About 850,000 were expected to attend the festival at Flushing Meadows Park. It’s not far from St. Francis Prep, the local epicenter of the swine flu outbreak, and also PS 177 in Flushing, where there are several suspected cases.

While all the entertainment is coming from within the U.S., organizer Carmelo Maceda said: “We cannot control the crowd. We don’t know how many people fly in from Mexico or they just went to Mexico. That’s why we don’t want to take that risk.”

City officials said they did not recommend the festival cancel their festivities, but Maceda said they couldn’t afford to take a chance.

“We start thinking if something happened in the park as a Mexican community we don’t have the power or the money to control a contamination of thousands of thousands of people,” Maceda said.

The Cinco de Mayo Festival will be rescheduled in the coming weeks.