Morning Anxiety 1: the plague, the bus, the net

Last night the King County health department held a press conference to announce the identification of 6 cases of probable H1N1, aka swine flu, in WA, 3 in King County, 2 in the county just to the north and one in eastern WA. Today the radio says WA authorities have to send the samples to the CDC for confirmation. RantWoman assumes local authorities must be pretty certain or they would not have held a press conference, but RantWoman does wonder what magical blessings the specialists at the CDC will have to utter to verify this.

Those of us who like our denial fresh and refreshed daily now have the option of postponing our freakout for at least a few hours! We have the option, but....

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Dear Mr. President,

HELLO Mr. President. Live on planet Earth PLEASE Mr. President! It does NOT necessarily make sense to tell people to stay off the bus if they are sick. At least some of the people who get sick are not going to have any other way to get to medical treatment besides the bus! At least some of the people who ride the bus all the time need to ride the bus to get to other regularly scheduled medical treatment.

It's not like there is a reason you would have to think about this what with Marine 1, the presidential limo and all that, but you need to put your ear out SOMEWHERE about this point.

In fact, although we all need to wash our hands and cover our coughs anyway, SOME of us regular bus riders suspect that riding the bus keeps our immune systems fit and toned and able to respond quickly to all kinds of infectious assaults. Well, we suspect that but we still wash our hands!

Love RantWoman

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The radio this morning reports that huge numbers of people are signing onto the CDC's Twitter client to follow news of the pandemic. Everyone RantWoman knows who follows Twitter, especially some who must be new users complain that there are lots of problems with Twitter overload just now. This should surprise no one since Twitter like all services that rely on computers and computer networks has a finite capacity, a capacity it might be possible to beef up quickly but still a finite capacity.

What's Twitter? That's the consensus of an email list for visually impaired computer users, the kind that would, in the general jargon of IT marketers, be considered blind geekware power users but not necessarily early adopters. In other words, if you want to reach blind people with info about the pandemic of the week, don't bother with Twitter.

Just last week, one of the blind programming lists RantWoman reads posted a link for an accessible Twitter client. RantWoman has not bothered interacting with Twitter yet mostly because she has more than enough input streams already. Count this as one RantWoman unwittingly doing her part not to contribute to Twitter overload.

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Speaking of input overload, RantWoman wonders how a lot of Spanish-speaking and probably mixed status families she knows are getting info at this point. RantWoman wonders but she does not necessarily wonder hard enough to go find some Spanish-language media streams and see for herself, at least until she writes up a whole "cobbler's children have no shoes" saga about her own extended family!