Swine flu tops Egypt news – my take on Maadi case

I went down to Maadi this afternoon to check out the area around Nasr Street, which was shut down late Wednesday for two hours. It was pretty much back to normal, only saw one man wearing a mask. I spoke with the country’s McDonald’s head of marketing, Sherif Coutri, and he said that “the shutdown was due to employees of GAPCO testing positive for the virus.”

My full article should be posted on Al-Masry Al-Youm later today and details the confusion surrounding the situation in Maadi, which saw the CairoScholars listserv bombarded with emails calling on people to “not eat out” or “to avoid the area because one person was infected at the McDonalds” there. These were wrong.

In Dokki, Sherif Samir, who works at a local company, said there was mass panic at his office after an employee got sick. The staff was walking around the office with masks all day for fear they would catch something. It turned out that the person did not have the H1N1 virus.

“Like many places in Egypt, they did it because of panic and confusion as well as precautionary measures,” Samir revealed.

Here is an AFP article about the most recent reported case: a young toddler.