Swine flu: would you travel?

If you have been anywhere near the internet these few days, you know the airwaves have been plastered with news of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

Besides getting information from typical news outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian, or official sources like the WHO (World Health Organization) and CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention), the internet is buzzing with bottoms-up grassroots efforts to track the spread of the virus.

From the 2009 Swine flu wikipedia page, to swine flu alerts on twitter, there’s lots of ways to keep informed — or to feed our paranoia, depending on how you look at it — about the spread of the virus. There’s even a Singapore-based swine flu website (www.swineflu.sg) that does a great job of tracking the virus.

I was scheduled to go Las Vegas last Saturday for about a week for work. But I ended up canceling the trip because of the swine flu, not because I feared getting the disease — the chances of that happening are vanishingly minuscule — but because of potential travel disruptions should anything happen.

Just over the weekend the Hong Kong authorities decided to quarantine the Metropark Hotel in Wanchai based on one confirmed H1N1 case, disrupting tourists and travelers, seven Singaporeans included. Singapore itself has taken a decidedly strong stance on the issue, enforcing a home quarantine order for travelers returning from Mexico or US, beginning today.

Not a fun time to travel at all, I think. Still, I’m curious. Would you travel?