A $40 million dollar death: Is NYC the swine flu’s next victim?

The $40 million flu?

The family of New York City’s first swine flu fatality might be riding their emotional distress right to the bank. Apparently, government officials didn’t react with quite enough panic over the H1N1 outbreak.

Right.

But that’s the argument of Bonnie Weiner, the widow of assistant principal Mitch Weiner, who died on May 17 after contracting H1N1. She intends to file a $40 million wrongful death suit against the city, citing negligence and failure to alert Weiner that he risked infection with the flu.

The claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, charges that the city failed to warn Mr. Wiener that he had been in contact with others who had tested positive for the virus; that it did not act fast enough to stop the transmission of the disease, that it did not disseminate adequate information about health conditions that would increase the risks of the virus, and that it did not provide a safe working environment for Mr. Wiener and other school employees, among other allegations.

via Family of Swine Flu Victim Plans to Sue City – City Room Blog – NYTimes.com.

Weiner worked at a public school in Queens, New York, where several students came down with the flu a few weeks before his death. Eventually, municipal officials closed the school for three days, but by then Weiner had already been hospitalized with complications from the illness.

Ms. Weiner will surely file her lawsuit. And if she’s successful, she’ll set a precedent that would give the city at least forty-seven other reasons to worry, according to data from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

But I’m not convinced. First of all, Weiner, 55, had underlying health conditions that exacerbated his susceptibility to death-by-flu. Furthermore, he wasn’t even on the radar of likely victim-hood: that’s reserved for those over 65 or younger than two, and pregnant women. And let’s not forget that an estimated 500,000 New Yorkers have been infected with H1N1, but only 47 have died and fewer than 1,000 have been hospitalized.

Hardly cause for alarm bells – or lawsuits – in my book. Last week, the federal government even mandated that school closures should be “a last resort” to combat H1N1 this fall. Non-H1N1 flu viruses kill 1,000 New Yorkers a year. Mr. Weiner’s flu was particularly bad, and it was still an unknown ailment. Governments – and Twitter users – were all scrambling for more information, and some kind of solution.

So, a school administrator – with underlying health problems – contracts a mystery flu virus and dies. Sounds less like a lawsuit, and more like a serious case of bad luck.