# 3211
Sad news to report tonight.
The Assistant Principal - Mitchell Wiener - from a Queens High School who has been severely ill for a week, and on a ventilator, has died from the H1N1 Swine Flu virus.
This from the New York Times.
First Swine Flu Death Reported in New York
Published: May 17, 2009
The assistant principal of a Queens school who had been hospitalized with swine flu died on Sunday evening. It was the first death in New York State from the outbreak and came as city officials announced that five more Queens schools had been closed.
The assistant principal, Mitchell Wiener, had been “overwhelmed” by the illness despite treatment with an experimental drug, according to Ole Pedersen, a spokesman for Flushing Hospital Medical Center, where Mr. Wiener had been a patient since last Wednesday.
Mr. Pedersen said that Mr. Wiener, the assistant principal of Intermediate School 238 in Hollis, one of the schools closed last week, had been on a ventilator and had slipped in and out of consciousness during his illness.
The closings announced on Sunday followed a sharp rise in the number of students at the schools who have fallen ill with flulike symptoms, brings the number of shuttered schools to 10 in Queens and one in Brooklyn.
