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 well .. actually the pill is YELLOW and the name is commonly used daily as um, “cell phone” in South Korea with the bulk concentrated around the Capital of Seoul .

as of October 30th drugstores around the nation are allowed to prescribe ‘Tamiflu’ and the mass population is grabbing for it at the first sign of /anything/ resembling a cold or even sore throat .

it was barely this Summer when only Koreans flying in from abroad were caught to have H1N1 Virus or commonly known as Swine Flu but as Koreans are mobile NOT only in Metro Seoul but around the Globe, the dreaded hype has caught on FAST .

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it is now such that every other company has employees with the virus and not many schools nor families are left out neither . the spread result from some very Korean way of daily life in modern, developed society circa 2009 :

  1. when work is over (pretty late around 7pm) salary people don’t go straight home but eat out or gather for some kind of liquor that will doze the city stress away,
  2. as the H1N1 Virus is known to effect children more it hit the circuit head on, for Korean children start pre, pre school earlier than their counterparts in other developed nations – mostly dawn by parents who deem earlier start an upper hand in competition among the mass population packed in a tiny penninsula . and ofcourse YOU should know : learning English is the “thing” for say, 4 year old and onwards ?
  3. but again the GOOD news is that medical insurance in South Korea is pretty wide spread and working well, so much so that aside from the most remote locations any citizen can get a light check-up at a nearby clinic .
  4. add to this that as proud citizens of a prime IT nation : Koreans are /always/ linked to some kind of network (even logged on via cell phone while commuting), thus up-to-date news is always flowing on the whatabouts of the on-going epidemic crisis .

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but everyone is taking it in pretty casually perhaps only because so many have come in contact now . story re-tells of a – NOT necessarily younger – family member having caught it, then getting over with 5 days of Tamiflu, with symptoms not much different than a cold .

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and no, I have NOT caught on yet .
for I am the last human on this planet now .
gotten used to it somehow .
for only TIME is my consolation .

and you can call me ‘Omega Man’ :