Voters in Downtown Fort Myers ready for 2024 ElectionPunta Gorda residents frustrated by hurricane debris delays
DOWNTOWN FORT MYERS Voters in Downtown Fort Myers ready for 2024 Election A lot can change in four years. During the 2020 election, many voters masked up as they cast their ballots, and the pandemic was at the top of many voters’ minds.
PUNTA GORDA Punta Gorda residents frustrated by hurricane debris delays Many people in parts of southwest Florida feel like they’ve dealt with more than their fair share of storm damage lately.
Miracle Moment: A rosy outlook following surprise diagnosis It’s time for Miracle Moment. Today, we meet a toddler diagnosed with a disease without known prevention or cure.
Poll workers ready for Election Day rush in Collier County Poll workers gear up for a busy Tuesday in Collier County; some have been there for a while, and this year marks their first time working at a polling place for others.
CAPE CORAL Voters decide: Will Cape Coral City Council members stay or go? Stipends, Jaycee Park and new developments have been topics of concern in the City of Cape Coral for months now.
MATLACHA Lee County residents still dealing with damage from hurricanes Hurricane recovery has been an ongoing project here in Southwest Florida since Hurricane Ian.
FGCU Former FGCU golfer Frankie Capan III makes PGA Tour After playing two seasons on the Korn Ferry Tour, former FGCU golfer Frankie Capan III is moving up to the PGA Tour.
Parents cast their votes for Lee County school superintendent With just hours now until the election, WINK News wants to highlight a few local races that haven’t gotten as much attention. One of them is the election of Lee County’s next superintendent of schools.
NORTH FORT MYERS Former Dollar General employee accused of stealing $7,000 in returns A woman has been arrested after defrauding a Dollar General in North Fort Myers.
FORT MYERS BEACH The Tropics and Red Tide; what happens if or when they interact? The Tropics are active despite the fact that there’s less than a month left in hurricane season. But how will a system interact with red tide?
CAPE CORAL Police investigate gunfire at Cape Coral rental home The bullet holes left behind by shots heard in a normally quiet Cape Coral neighborhood scared one woman into buying security cameras for her home.
CAPE CORAL Bimini Basin residents face housing challenges Time is running out for the families who live in one Cape Coral community to find places to call home.
Harris and Trump make a furious final push before Election Day A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
Using AI to detect pancreatic cancer Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death in the United States. That’s due in part to the limited testing available for early detection.
the weather authority Tropical Storm Rafael forms in the Caribbean The Weather Authority meteorologists are monitoring the Caribbean as Tropical Storm Rafael has formed.
DOWNTOWN FORT MYERS Voters in Downtown Fort Myers ready for 2024 Election A lot can change in four years. During the 2020 election, many voters masked up as they cast their ballots, and the pandemic was at the top of many voters’ minds.
PUNTA GORDA Punta Gorda residents frustrated by hurricane debris delays Many people in parts of southwest Florida feel like they’ve dealt with more than their fair share of storm damage lately.
Miracle Moment: A rosy outlook following surprise diagnosis It’s time for Miracle Moment. Today, we meet a toddler diagnosed with a disease without known prevention or cure.
Poll workers ready for Election Day rush in Collier County Poll workers gear up for a busy Tuesday in Collier County; some have been there for a while, and this year marks their first time working at a polling place for others.
CAPE CORAL Voters decide: Will Cape Coral City Council members stay or go? Stipends, Jaycee Park and new developments have been topics of concern in the City of Cape Coral for months now.
MATLACHA Lee County residents still dealing with damage from hurricanes Hurricane recovery has been an ongoing project here in Southwest Florida since Hurricane Ian.
FGCU Former FGCU golfer Frankie Capan III makes PGA Tour After playing two seasons on the Korn Ferry Tour, former FGCU golfer Frankie Capan III is moving up to the PGA Tour.
Parents cast their votes for Lee County school superintendent With just hours now until the election, WINK News wants to highlight a few local races that haven’t gotten as much attention. One of them is the election of Lee County’s next superintendent of schools.
NORTH FORT MYERS Former Dollar General employee accused of stealing $7,000 in returns A woman has been arrested after defrauding a Dollar General in North Fort Myers.
FORT MYERS BEACH The Tropics and Red Tide; what happens if or when they interact? The Tropics are active despite the fact that there’s less than a month left in hurricane season. But how will a system interact with red tide?
CAPE CORAL Police investigate gunfire at Cape Coral rental home The bullet holes left behind by shots heard in a normally quiet Cape Coral neighborhood scared one woman into buying security cameras for her home.
CAPE CORAL Bimini Basin residents face housing challenges Time is running out for the families who live in one Cape Coral community to find places to call home.
Harris and Trump make a furious final push before Election Day A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
Using AI to detect pancreatic cancer Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death in the United States. That’s due in part to the limited testing available for early detection.
the weather authority Tropical Storm Rafael forms in the Caribbean The Weather Authority meteorologists are monitoring the Caribbean as Tropical Storm Rafael has formed.
Portrait of deaf students in their classroom at Alexander Graham Bell School, 3730 North Oakley in the North Center community area, Chicago, Illinois, 1918. The boys in the photo read while the girls knit. (Photo by Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images) This isn’t the first time leaders have struggled with deciding whether to keep schools open in a pandemic. During the influenza pandemic in 1918, even though the world was a very different place, the discussion was just as heated. That pandemic killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, before it was all over. While the vast majority of cities closed their schools, three opted to keep them open — New York, Chicago and New Haven, according to historians. The decisions of health officials in those cities was based largely on the hypothesis of public health officials that students were safer and better off at school. It was, after all, the height of the Progressive Era, with its emphasis on hygiene in schools and more nurses for each student than is thinkable now. New York had almost 1 million school children in 1918 and about 75% of them lived in tenements, in crowded, often unsanitary conditions, according to a 2010 article in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service. “For students from the tenement districts, school offered a clean, well-ventilated environment where teachers, nurses, and doctors already practiced — and documented — thorough, routine medical inspections,” according to the Public Health Reports article. The city was one of the hardest and earliest hit by the flu, said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He was a co-author of the 2010 Public Health Reports article. “(Children) leave their often unsanitary homes for large, clean, airy school buildings, where there is always a system of inspection and examination enforced,” New York’s health commissioner at the time, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, told the New York Times after the pandemic had peaked there. Students weren’t allowed to gather outside school and had to report to their teacher immediately, according to Copeland. Teachers checked students for any signs of the flu, and students who had symptoms were isolated. If students had a fever, someone from the health department would take them home, and the health official would judge whether the conditions were suitable for “isolation and care,” according to Public Health Reports. If not, they were sent to a hospital. “The health department required families of the children recovering at home to either have a family physician or use the services of a public health doctor at no charge,” the Public Health Report article said. The argument in Chicago for leaving schools open for its 500,000 students was the same: keeping schools open would keep the children off the streets and away from infected adults, the reasoning went. If social distancing was helpful then, it would have been made easier by the fact that absenteeism in schools soared during the pandemic, perhaps because of what one Chicago public health official called “fluphobia” among parents. “The absentee rate was so great, it really didn’t matter” that schools were open, Markel said. Part of Chicago’s strategy was to ensure that fresh air was circulated. School rooms were overheated during the winter so that windows could remain open at all times, according to a 1918 paper by the Chicago Department of Health. The paper concluded that an analysis of data showed that “the decision of keeping the schools of this city open during the recent influenza epidemic was justified.” And in New York, then Health Commissioner Copeland told the New York Times: “How much better it has been to have the children under the constant observation of qualified persons than to close the schools.” Markel, who with other researchers pored over data and historical records in looking at the response of 43 cities to the 1918 pandemic, isn’t as convinced. New York “didn’t do the worst, but it didn’t do the best, either,” Markel said, adding Chicago was slightly better. Research showed that cities who implemented quarantining and isolation, school closures and bans on public gatherings fared the best, he said. “The cities that did more than one” of these measures “did better. School closures were part of that contribution,” Markel said. Public health experts, including Markel, are quick to point out that COVID-19 is not influenza, which was a well-known disease in 1918. There is still a lot to learn about the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. The right decision today, Markel said, is school closure. “It’s better,” he said, “to be safe than sorry.”