Guidelines regarding swine flu
Swine flu is a contagious influenza virus that has been spreading worldwide exceeding 12,000 different cases. Currently there have been 22 confirmed cases of swine flu in South Korea. The virus is spread from person to person though coughing or sneezing of people infected with the influenza virus. People may become infected by touching something with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose. Here is a list of symptoms.
1. Symptoms
Coughing, fever, soar throat, stuffy or runny nose, body aches,
headaches, chills, fatigue, nausea and vomiting
2. Reporting process
symptoms > report to campus director>report to the divisional
director> report to the HR dept>provide guidelines
3 Guidelines
* Do not travel abroad until further notice
* Do not go to public areas if possible
* Employees will have their body temps checked daily and results will be recorded
* Wash hands 3 times a day. Teachers must wash hands before and after class
* Classrooms will sanitized before and after class for safety measures
* Avalon transportation vehicles will be sterilized for safety measures
* Notice will be sent to parents regarding Avalon’s guidelines about the swine flu virus
* All head office employees must be aware of the guidelines to prevent swine flu
* Guidelines will be posted and students must be aware of the guidelines
4. Mandatory Instructions:
A. Daily body temp check ups
-All Avalon employees must get a body temperature check and report the results to the HR dept.
B. Instructions fro foreign teachers and staff members
-anyone that comes back form their vacation after May 25th must stay at home for one week
-New teachers and staff members must stay at home for two weeks in the month of May
-No overseas vacation and business travel
-FOREIGN TEACHERS AND STAFF MEMBERS MUST SUBMIT THEIR PASSPORT TO THEIR DIRECTOR UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
C. We fully understand the ongoing situation and taking any safety measures to ensure and protect our employees and students from swine flu. Employees should not be too concerned over this matter. Company related information should not be leaked or exchanged to a third party member.
Well, when you presume to implement reactionary, dangerous, and potentially illegal measures, you can pretty much guarantee your policies will get out.
47 comments:
I give them 30 days until they lose ALL their foreign teachers.
This is starting to get a bit mental.
Especially considering that apart from our friends in Seocho in quarantine there haven't been any new cases in Korea. Has there?
* Do not travel abroad until further notice
So basically management's golfing sex tours to Thailand are off the table? Not likely.
* Do not go to public areas if possible
Ummm. Like the grocery store? WTF?
* Employees will have their body temps checked daily and results will be recorded.
By whom? Yeah like this policy will be enforced for about 3 days.
* Wash hands 3 times a day. Teachers must wash hands before and after class
Ummmm what % of your Korean coworkers wash their hands coming out of the can? And will they get those infernal public hand towels out of the bathroom? Really does no good if you just reinfect yourself touching a public hand towel.
* Classrooms will sanitized before and after class for safety measures
You mean someone will actually pick up the food waste kids just leave on their desks?
* Avalon transportation vehicles will be sterilized for safety measures
They're not cleaning those things out regularly already?
* Guidelines will be posted and students must be aware of the guidelines
I wonder if the english guidelines match the korean guidelines?
In Canada during SARS, politicians made very public overtures to the Asian community to calm their fears they'll be singled out. Our PM ate in a Chinese restaurant etc. Princess Di was always famous for hugging kids with AIDS etc. Odds of foreigners getting the same courtesy in Korea are about nil, I suppose.
The wannabe cynic in me also thinks that this is part of their ongoing below-the-belt marketing techniques to hurt the competition.
Note that they're sending stuff to the parents.
The message: "We're taking measures to protect your child against swine flu. What other school is doing that?"
So they're fabricating an assumption that other hagwons are disease infested.
"Wash hands 3 times a day"
Only 3 times? ewwwwwwwwwwwww.
I would NEVER give up my passport to my director...if God forbid something happened I would not want to be without it. That is really shocking!
As posted on Facebook, requesting employee passports is considered 'labor trafficking'. As such, wouldn't it be illegal at best, a human rights violation at worst?
Either way, I can't imagine their staff being all that happy about the new policy.
OK, WTF? Some of these things do make sense, but definitely not all. Don't go to public places? How? Are those teachers supposed to sit at home and starve after school. Give up their passports? If my school said "you must give up your passport," I would say "F you!" I really doubt any of their foreign teachers will put up with that unless they are in a situation where they have to. Banning overseas travel is ridiculous, at the most they may be able to say that you have to be back at least 7 days before you can start school again, to decrease the risk of spreading the virus.
Some of the other measures aren't too bad, but only if ALL of the teachers at the school must follow them.
Hi Brian, I came across your blog recently. You have lots of great insight and information. This is a quote from the British Embassy in Korea regarding the passports issue: "Retain your passport. Your employer has no legal right to hold your passport, and is not required to do so by the Korean authorities. Your passport remains the property of the British Government at all times. Please contact the Consular Section of the British Embassy for advice, if your employer insists on keeping your passport."
http://ukinkorea.fco.gov.uk/en/help-for-british-nationals/living-in-korea/legal-issues-be-aware
The school should be reported.
I actually work for Avalon...
The Korean teachers are being forced to clean their hands too.
It's not just for the foreign teachers- it's for everyone in the building. I haven't heard about the passport though... Will DEFINITELY ask about that when I can go back to work next week...
Thanks Brian for this... You know more than we do -.-
US passports remain the property of US government and should not be surrendered to any third party. You should be able to end that asshattery by contacting the embassy.
Yeah...they can have my passport / diploma when they pry it out of my cold, dead, mad cow diseased AND swine flued fingers...
Of course, the teachers can just say 'ne' and probably not be followed up on...
I don't believe the hand washing is what is pissing people off. Surrendering your passport is absurd and banning overseas travel is not effective. It all boils down to a hagwon loosing money because their foreign teachers want to go travel and they may be quarantined upon there reentry. In turn causing scheduling problems and possibly loosing money from overtime and pissy ass ajummas.. Its all about those wons.
||The message: "We're taking measures to protect your child against swine flu. What other school is doing that?" So they're fabricating an assumption that other hagwons are disease infested.||
Spot on, Joe. The question then is the next school down the street might up the ante and be like "oh yeah, well, we're being even MORE vigilant...." And they pile on some other insane measures. One can well see the ultimate conclusion being "we have no diseased foreigners in our schools ever!"
I would like to see a school up the ante to giving all its dirty foreigner teachers 2 months of paid holiday until this horrid horrid plague burns itself out. Ah now that would be nice.
LMAO, two months paid vacation...I would kiss a pig myself
Currently there have been 22 confirmed cases of swine flu in South Korea.
There are now 35 confirmed cases, and so far it is mainly people coming in from abroad. Who would that be? Foreigners coming to Korea for work and Korean nationals returning home from school abroad, and these are the groups the Korean media is talking about — yes, they talk about the infected Koreans even though so far two-thirds have been English teachers.
The passport thing is completely wrong: the cases where one should give up their passport are extremely rare, and this is not one of them; even then, you give it up to a proper authority, not your hagwon.
The one-week self-quarantine for people traveling from abroad is probably wise, considering how air travel and transit has been a key mode of transmission in East Asian cases (see link above).
H1N1 is not the mere flu. It has a fatality rate seven to ten times higher than "regular" flu — 0.7% , not 0.7 per 1000 — and unlike the regular flu it may be hitting younger people harder (regular flu fatalities are disproportionately higher for the elderly than for younger people) in part because of a 1957 outbreak which may have bolstered the immunity of people around back then.
If you don't mind me asking, do we know this was distributed on orders from Avalon headquarters? Was it sent out as an email? As a memo? By whom?
I'd also like to know that: is this one avalon school, several, or all?
I work for the Avalon at the Bundang campus. The HR department is in our building. I can guarantee that it was sent to all the corporate schools. The franchises have different management, so who knows what they will choose to do. However, as of late Friday night they told us they would not take our passports, but the rest of the guidelines will be enforced.
Ok, you didn't need me to tell you this but snatching passports = illegal, illegal, illegal.
(lawyer guy signing off)
아사 writes: "The Korean teachers are being forced to clean their hands too."
That is too funny because you really do need to force Koreans to wash their hands. I am disgusted by Koreans who take a number 2 in the bathroom and then leave without washing their hands. I would imagine most of the people reading this are like me in that if there was no soap for me to wash my hands with after taking a number 2, I would go from bathroom to bathroom looking for soap, and not stop until I could wash my hands properly. But then again, I am not a Korean (i.e. I didn't do something really really bad in a past life to reincarnated as one of the...pure bred people).
As to the passport, you can take it out of my death grip after you have taken my life. If you go on the army base, they cant even hold your passport. The US embassy can confiscate your passport, but you have to do something seriously wrong.
If asked for your passport, simply state that it is the property of your country and not you and that you are forbidden BY LAW from handing it over to your employer. If they question you more, tell them, "please understand my country..." and hand them the phone number of your country's Seoul embassy
Has anyone else been to a hospital lately? I went for my appointment (I have gone to this hospital a few times before.), and when I was making my next appointment they demanded to see my ID card and wouldn't process my next appointment without it. They have never done this before.
Brent, your ARC holds your insurance information (NHIC is tied to your ARC number). It's perfectly reasonable for them to ask for the card. They wish to know if you are insured before they treat you. My Korean friends say the same thing.
Kushibo, the problem with your stats is they only take into account confirmed cases. There's evidence the flu is largely mild and goes unreported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak#Data_accuracy
Also if you look at death rates for the USA the rate is .2%. So ummmm double that of the regular flu (from .1% to .2% but like .2%? c'mon).
If you accept these measures: check/quarantines for those who go abroad to places where there are high incidences of a potentially deadly disease, then maybe Koreans should also be prepared to accept HIV tests for all those who travel to Thailand and Cambodia. Hmmm?
mindmetoo, you make some good points, which I addressed here (they're too long for this comments section).
In a nutshell, that's a twice-as-high mortality rate that is comparing two very different populations: over-65s who make up 90% of the fatalities for "regular" flu versus mostly under-50s who make up the deaths for the 2009 outbreak of H1N1. In short, this is a much more severe disease for those born after 1957 than is the regular flu, and it's in everyone's best interest to put the brakes on it at least until a vaccine can be made ready for mass distribution.
As for the HIV test, checking someone immediately after they return would yield a negative result even after they return (I don't recall the current window is between infection and antibodies showing up on the test). In fact, there is an extensive amount of HIV testing done as part of routine medical checkups in Korea, which would cover (I think) most but probably not all of the people you're talking about.
When I'm in Korea this summer I'm planning to investigate this further, in part through interviews with the public health people involved in HIV in Korea.
Robert:
This was posted as a notice on the wall and given out as a memo. I had the text emailed me, and also have pictures of the flyers, too, which were printed on Avalon letterhead. I didn't post them because you never know who saw the NSETs snapping pictures of them, so that might be a give-away. At first I wasn't sure whether it was just one branch or all of them, but when I asked around to other teachers I heard it was going on at other campuses. Emails that came to me after this was posted said the school/branch plans to do away with the passport requirement, but I'm not sure yet if that's a schoolwide decision or what.
I'll let others speak to the legality/ethics of printing memos that get passed along to me, especially when the memos say not to send these outside the company. However, quite clearly in a school with thousands of employees, pulling crap like this won't fly, and news will get out. Same with universities and public schools that have imposed mandatory seven-day quarantines for people coming here from the US or Japan, or for teachers arriving past May 11th. Certainly people have a right to know this, and to let it inform their decisions to come here and work.
It also makes it difficult for those of us who already booked tickets to other countries . . . here in Jeollanam-do we had to book our flights home a couple of weeks ago. I'm going home regardless, quarantine be damned, but people who booked week-long vacations home or to Japan or elsewhere may now face a seven-day quarantine, something they and their schools might not have planned for. And in cases where schools and universities have banned international travel, people are going to find themselves out all kinds of money if they can't get refunds for tickets, hotels, etc.
All tips I get are confidential and I don't reveal sources, unless that person wants me to or wants a hat-tip for themselves or their site.
I work at Avalon English and have heard nothing of this but I am looking forward to going to work later today!
I also work at Avalon but haven't heard about this yet. However I am supposed to be leaving the country this weekend - will I likely be quarantined on my return?
kushibo,
||mostly under-50s who make up the deaths for the 2009 outbreak of H1N1||
What percentage are healthy people? I've read nothing that leads me to believe this flu is not shrugged off, like most, by healthy people.
The flu in North America has infected people coming back from Mexico following spring break. That's not a senior crowd. In this early stage they're not going to pass it on to many people over the age of 65. So no surprise in the epidemiology: mortality is seen in under 50 (with underlying medical conditions).
Again, that doctors are calling the majority of cases mild (and therefore most go unreported) the death rates are not at all accurate.
||In fact, there is an extensive amount of HIV testing done as part of routine medical checkups in Korea ||
You could document what you claim is a fact?
The window for hiv testing is about 22 days. So, a month after your return, you get tested. What are the odds the average Korean returning from Thailand is going to get an HIV test within 1 month?
mindmetoo, the under-50 aspect is because, they believe, the 1957 flu pandemic of a similar strain and less virulent subsequent strains may have provided immunity for many people who were around then.
Whatever the reason, it remains that you're comparing a mortality rate for "regular" flu that far and away affects more elderly with the 2009 H1N1 that affects younger people. This is an indication that it is more virulent than regular flu for those younger people.
My point (and it's the point of public health specialists across the globe) is that this is nothing to scoff at as the same as regular flu. It's not. It's a new strain, it's only now in round 1, and we need to control it as much as possible until a usable vaccine is available.
You make a good point about less healthy people being more likely to be affected, but the same is true of regular flu as well, so the higher mortality rate remains a concern.
As for the HIV testing, I wrote here and here about what I'm talking about, but I do need to go back and — in the context of the E2 regulations — re-verify these sources.
Rob wrote:
I work at Avalon English and have heard nothing of this but I am looking forward to going to work later today!
Well, if that's true (or if they've reneged on some of the things like the stupidly wrong passport policy), you'd better inform the guy who's trying to destroy the business you work for:
If you'd like to tell these Avalon people just what you think, call them at 031-717-0047 and/or webmaster@avalon.co.kr.
And even AFTER they cave and change their policies, or this blows over -- if you've found this page by Googling 아발론교육 or Avalon Enlglish, along with possible keyword string searches such as "teach English in Korea" or "English language institutes in Korea", you know you'd never want to work for an employer like this, would you? One that actually TREATS you like the foreign animal, the walking dictionary that most other places may assume you to be, but would never dare cross that line of actually treating you as such?
This must be one of the worst places to work as a foreigner in Korea, if their reaction to the slight swine flu problem is the racist scapegoating of foreigners. Whoever made this policy sounds like one of the most ignorant, uneducated, misinformed, incompetent, and racist idiot who ever popped a placenta on the Korean peninsula.
Hell, yeah I'm trying to spread the word about anyone implementing such policies. Isn't that done out of the same shock and outrage that motivated this post being made in the first place?
SO I listed their contact info so people can call and give them a piece of their minds. And get the story from the horse's mouth, too.
To those of you who work at Avalon, are there foreign staff members at Avalon who are not teachers?
To wit, where the memo twice says "foreign teachers and staff members," is it saying to foreign teachers and to foreign staff members, or is it saying to foreign teachers and to staff members?
Has there been a Korean-language memo to the Korean-speaking staff, and does it differ from the English-language memo?
Can anyone currently working at Avalon: teachers, R&D people, or staff confirm/update us? Wondering whether the abovementioned passport confiscation was real, planned, documented, rescinded, or in effect.
What's the mood at Avalon?
The passport confiscation was real, but they rescinded it very quickly. As of now they are enforcing the other parts of the guidelines. They are making us cancel any international travel we had planned, and offering to pay the fees to change it, but not to refund and money lost from cancellation. As most people know Avalon has two parts. They have a corporate version which is mainly Bundang ( Migem, Sunae, Jeongja, imae), Songpa, Yongtong, Yongin, suji, Joong Gye, Mok Dong,Pyeong Cheon, and Busan. These schools are the target of the guidelines from the HR department. The other Avalon schools which are not mentioned are franchises. These school have the right to do whatever they want to do. We are pretty much told not to share information with them, when it comes to curriculum and training. I doubt they got the same memo.I have no idea because I work for one of the corporate schools.
At our campus the morale is pretty good. Avalon has been a really good hagwon to work for. They have their share of asshatery, but they pay us on time and honor their contracts...until now....
Brian;
Daveseslcafe has removed both of our two threads on this topic. Do you have any idea why?
Maybe for naming hagwon names? I don't get why some threads survive while others get cut with no explanation.
I thought about posting up the English Channel pop-up; I'll do it later and see how long it lasts.
Thanks for the heads up.
Daveseslcafe has removed both of our two threads on this topic. Do you have any idea why?
I would ask Dave directly instead of speculating on it.
lee said...
I also work at Avalon but haven't heard about this yet. However I am supposed to be leaving the country this weekend - will I likely be quarantined on my return?
Your campus will probably try really hard to dissuade you from leaving, but the weekend already passed hasn't it.
Well, we've started reporting our temps today. When we clock in, we also get to use the thermometer to show record our temps. Great, huh?
Any other campuses start doing this?
Are all of the teachers being made to check their temperatures, or just the foreign teachers?
all teachers are required to record temps. the elementary campus at my location is also doing it, but i'm not sure about the middle school campus.
the mood is fine- we joke about the situation we're in right now.
to answer kushibo-
i haven't seen the memo itself. i think it was sent to our campus director who told us what's going on. since i know korean, i've been told the same as the korean teachers, but who knows about the other campuses.
the staff members are korean btw- they have to be able to communicate with disgruntled parents. the only foreigners in avalon are the foreign teachers or those who are part of the r&d team (or so i've been told)
I have no problem with the temperature checks, but I do with the hypocrisy. They are supposed to be sanitizing the classrooms, making the kids wash their hands, providing hand sanitizer and etc. But they think it is okay to wipe the end of the probe off with a dry cloth between uses. I would like to know how many germs are transferred onto that cloth over 8 temperatures checks and then is inserted in the last teachers ear. When I asked for some alcohol or probe covers they laughed and thought I was joking. Then they got indigent when i told them no, I wasn't going to be inoculated with someone else's ear infection. The concept of hygiene evades them.
I would ask Dave directly instead of speculating on it.
Dave is an absentee landowner and the moderators act as a council of stewards in his stead. They would be the ones to contact. However, I won't, because you never know if you're going to accidentally tick them off, and some of them hold grudges. You can get banned and never find out why. (Ask mindmetoo.)
By the way, every thread on Stephanie White also gets removed.
No such thing happened in avalon englich
Whatever you say, Sabin.
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