Four more private schools closed yesterday, two public schools and a charter school will shut today, hundreds of inmates were quarantined, and hospital emergency rooms were flooded as near-panic over swine flu swept through the Big Apple.
Hundreds of students from schools that remained open went home with flu symptoms or were pulled out by worried parents as the number of confirmed cases in the city climbed to 201.
“My fever is high and they told me they’re going to give me more medicine. They said I might have the flu,” said a facemask-clad Amineki Daley, 12, who was among an overflow crowd at the Queens General Hospital ER in Hillcrest.
“It’s kind of scary in there. Everyone’s coughing.”
Spurring the panic was Monday’s death of 16-month-old Jonathan Zamora Castillo at Elmhurst Hospital — although by last night, the Health Department had determined that tests “did not indicate H1N1 [swine flu] infection.”
“It is very tragic, regardless of what caused it,” said Mayor Bloomberg.
Last night, six kids, ranging in age from 1 to 17, were rushed by ambulance from the same South Ozone Park house to Queens General, suffering from fever, sore throats and vomiting.
Meanwhile, a funeral will be held this afternoon for Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal at IS 238 in Queens — the city’s first swine-flu fatality. A total of seven people have died in the US.
St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Astoria, Queens, closed for at least a week yesterday after dozens of parents yanked kids out, despite no cases of illness being reported there.
“Parents call and say, ‘I don’t want to send my son or daughter to school,’ ” said Hector Florero, a custodian at St. Joseph’s.
Horace Mann, a prestigious Bronx private school, also closed for the week because many students have been going home with flu symptoms.
“We’re happy!” crowed one kid there. “Now I can play some golf!”
A parent said the only reason Horace Mann was closing was to avoid legal liability.
“I think it’s nuts! They’re panicking,” she said.
Two other schools closed yesterday: South Bronx Charter and Holy Family in Flushing, Queens.
And officials said two other public schools would be closing today — PS 130 in lower Manhattan and PS 35 in Hollis, Queens.
Also closing will be the Merrick Academy Charter School in Jamaica. That brings the total of shuttered schools citywide to 23.
In Nassau County, 13 more cases of the flu — 12 of them schoolkids and one 4-year-old who was hospitalized — were confirmed, bringing the total there to 38. The child had been to Mexico with family members.
At one city school that remained open — PS 12 in Woodside — up to 60 kids with flu symptoms were segregated in a “sick room” and the auditorium.
On Rikers Island, seven housing units containing 280 inmates were under quarantine because eight prisoners with confirmed or suspected cases of swine flu had spent time there. Twenty-eight inmates were kept from court hearings because of the quarantine.