NEW YORK — A cough in a subway car: It’s as familiar a sound in New York as the honking of horns in traffic. So Michelle Henriques was startled the other day on her morning commute to hear a man’s cough greeted by a gruff reply from a fellow passenger: "Hey, would you mind covering your mouth?”
"It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that,” says Henriques, an office assistant at a Manhattan company.
There’s little evidence of panic in New York, where the highest concentration of U.S. swine flu cases has been found, or elsewhere in the country. But even as authorities try to understand the scope of the threat, it’s been producing subtle changes in some daily routines.
For Henriques, 29, the morning that began with the tart exchange in a subway car continued with a trip to a drugstore to buy a half-dozen bottles of hand sanitizer for the office.
And it seems many New Yorkers have been making similar trips to pharmacies over the last few days: Surgical masks were sold out at some of them.
Some, like Nancy Friedman, a Manhattan mother of two, were trying to be philosophical about the threat and changing little if anything — for now.
"I guess I don’t see the flu as any more of a threat than any of the other myriad of things that could happen in New York,” says Friedman.
Poll offers snapshot
A Gallup poll done Tuesday indicates that most Americans have not changed their behavior in significant ways. It found that only 1 to 3 percent of those questioned had canceled a trip, opted out of mass transit or eating out, stayed home from work or kept a child out of school.
However, a number of mothers said they were taking various precautions — including considering taking kids out of school, should things get worse.
by the associated press
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