What would we have done if swine flu hit during a regional?

[Rick TYler]

To go back to the thread title, the swine flu panic was just getting rolling in the days before last weekend's Vex World Championships in Dallas. What IFI did was respect the wishes of the various schools. Since students in Mexico were forbidden to participate in sports or extracurricular events (were all the schools closed, too? I don't remember), IFI asked them not to come. They then extended an automatic invitation to World Championships 2010 to all those teams. Some individual schools in the rest of the world decided not to allow their teams to participate, including a few from the US. I believe that around 25 of 285 registered teams did not attend. The event itself went fine, with little bottles and various dispensers of alcohol hand cleaner everywhere, and only a handful of people wearing gloves and/or masks.

Of course, our club had an outbreak of a nasty viral infection (including me), but it wasn't the flu. It was some other non-specific viral head-cold thing with low fever, nasty stuffiness, coughing and sore throat. I hate getting sick on a trip, and I blame my son. The good thing is that it allowed me to take today off and get caught up on my robot forum reading.