School kept news of pneumonia victim's death from its students

Schoolchildren were kept in the dark about the death of the Ko family's eight-year-old daughter because the principal feared his pupils were too young to cope with the situation.

Ngai Hing, principal of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals' Wong See Sum Primary School in Tsing Yi, said yesterday he had been told of the girl's death on February 10.

Without knowing that the girl's brother had contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus, and fearing that the students could not handle news of the girl's death, he decided to tell his students that she had dropped out of school.

'We felt very sad when we got the news from her mother.

'We feared that Primary One students were too young to handle it.

'So, we told her classmates that the girl had dropped out,' Mr Ngai said. 'We only knew her brother was infected with H5N1 on Wednesday when we came to realise how serious the whole thing was,' he said.

However, Mr Ngai said that if students asked him about the girl's situation, he would tell them the truth. 'They are Primary One students. We had to take into account how well they could take in the news. We didn't want to lie to them. We need to set a good example to our students,' he said.