This month Ladue, and the country broadly, have been hit with an onslaught of influenza. First arriving during finals season, the flu knocked students out of the classroom. Jackson Lloyd (10) missed the last Friday of first semester and had to make up his tests.
“I was hoping I could have made it to school [Friday], but I woke up at like 3 A.M. and I had to throw up, and I had a fever and everything,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd missed two finals and had to complete retakes, which he received with a general ambivalence.
“[Makeup testing] was something of an inconvenience,” Lloyd said. “I guess it had to happen just because I’d missed [a day of finals].”
It wasn’t just Lloyd who missed finals, Kalvin Moore (10) also missed two days of finals week. He knew it was the flu from the start after experiencing the usual symptoms.
“[I felt] bad. [I experienced] headaches, nausea when I did any movement, and [felt] cold flashes,” Moore said.
While Moore also got a chance to complete a makeup test, unlike Lloyd, he felt that the three weeks of Winter Break had been detrimental to his final performance.
“When I was taking [the makeup test], I thought it went well [until I got it back],” Moore said. “[If] I was there for the chemistry test [I missed] on the day of, I would have done better.”
Having served as school nurse for six years at this point, Niccole Harrison has quite a lot of experience with the flu, and in flu prevention.
“There isn’t anything that is specifically going to cure [flu],” Harrison said. “There is medicine that some doctors will give to some patients that can sometimes limit the days or make it not as bad, but a lot of doctors don’t prescribe anything to healthy kids, because the side effects can be worse.”
Like most others Lloyd, he experienced the usual symptoms of the flu: headaches, fever, nausea, sore throat and body aches. Despite feeling slightly ill, he still went to school.
“Thursday I went [to class] and I felt a little under the weather,” Lloyd said. “But enough to where I could possibly say it was allergies or something.”
Scientists argued that this year’s flu season has been particularly disastrous with reports indicating that most people aren’t immunized against this year’s flu.
“I would say personally, in terms of infectiousness and symptoms [this year has been] particularly worse than I might have expected it to be in the past,” Lloyd said.
ABC news reported over 18 million cases of flu by mid January and those numbers were reflected in the school with students missing classes across the board. Outside of the High School entire families like Lloyds were sick.
“My little sister, who is seven years old, and my mom, were both sick,” Lloyd said.
“Around that time, there were a lot of people I knew who were sick.”
This year’s flu was undoubtedly worse, with more severe symptoms and faster spread. A new strain originating from Australia caused a shock to the country and the globe at large.
“Usually it just takes me a while to recover [from the flu] but this year was something else,” Moore said.
