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The seasonal flu hit San Ysidro High School math teacher Kathleen Monagan just before Thanksgiving break. She was only surprised she’d avoided it as long as she had.
“I get a lot of wipes. I use sanitizer like it’s going out of style, but I just feel like, you know it’s gonna be impossible,” Monagan said from her couch in San Diego. “Other people and kids have been sick since September, October, and so when I finally got it, I was like, ‘OK, OK. It’s time.’”
Schools are expected to face an array of seasonal bugs this winter, from common colds and influenza to COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), viral pneumonias, and even pertussis—the “whooping cough” or “100-day cough.” Teachers, studies show, are both at higher risk of catching the latest bug and more likely to continue working while sick than other professionals, even health care workers and flight attendants.
Whether teachers can “put their own mask on first” and stay healthy can make the difference in both curbing outbreaks and keeping up instruction.
Teachers are both uniquely vulnerable to, and can have more resilience to, seasonal bugs, said Dr. C. Buddy Creech, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases and the director of vaccine research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
They experience more stress than other professionals, which can reduce their immune system’s ability to ward off illness. And they get exposed to pretty much anything that comes down the pike, experts say.
“When we look at influenza annual epidemics, what we definitely know is that where it all starts is in schools. Kids get a little [virus], they take it to school, and all the people within that environment are the ones at risk,” said Jason Newland, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Nationwide Children’s Hospital at Ohio State University.
Schools have always been one of the chief hot spots for spreading respiratory and other viruses. A hundred years after the school-accelerated spread of the 1918 Spanish Flu , U.S. schools closed their doors in an attempt to curb COVID.
Teachers and administrators got a lot of practice in basic infection control during the COVID pandemic—such as hand-washing, sanitizing, and mask-wearing—but schools have not kept all of those protocols for more recent respiratory outbreaks, even severe ones, Newland said.
“We’ve had a big increase in mycoplasma pneumonia, or ‘walking pneumonia,’” Newland said. “Tons of people have had it, but I don’t think that triggered anybody to say, ‘Hey, we should probably have people put masks on.’”
Likewise, while many schools recently upgraded their heating and air conditioning systems, Creech said many don’t circulate classroom air frequently enough to keep teachers from getting sick from a roomful of sneezing students.
For the most part, it is now up to individual teachers to decide whether to stay home or mask up when they get sick. Compared to other professions, teachers are more likely to work through illness—and many teachers also say they don’t feel empowered to take their available sick leave.
For her part, Monagan hunkered down with humidifiers and blankets for a few days and counted her blessings. “I mean, at least it’s not COVID,” she said. “I’m taking that as a win and trying to just be positive about that.” She was already planning how to catch up on work when she got back to class.
Creech and Newland said teachers can do a lot to keep themselves healthy this winter:
Even if teachers do get sick, that frequent exposure may help boost teachers’ immunity in the long run—one reason why new teachers, and teachers of younger students, often get sick more often than veteran teachers, Creech said.
