All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

This story was nothing to sneeze at...

I'm happy to say that I’ve survived a few days in Mexico City and have none of the symptoms of swine flu. One thing however does feel different; how unconsciously alert I am to my own body and all sorts of warning signs/hazardous behaviors around me. Perhaps it is just a case of biological adaptation to increase your chances of survival in more dangerous environments (if anyone has research on that - please do send my way) or it is a layer of your subconscious that just heightens your peripheral awareness under changing circumstances, but it is oddly cool.

When our producer on the ground welcomed my outstretched hand at the airport with a warning that hand shakes should be avoided, that is when the story started to sink in. Saturday evening when I sneezed at a restaurant and people three tables over turned to look, it sunk in a little deeper.

By the time I woke up on Sunday, my body had gone into this state of being. I noticed a man coughing as he walked into the elevator and instinctively pressed the button with a knuckle instead of a fingertip. I didn’t touch the handrails on the way down to the lobby. I took notice of the doorman who sneezed and oddly I searched for him the next couple of days to make sure he still seemed healthy. I washed my hands far more often, became conscious of otherwise unconscious actions like how many times my fingers touched my eyes to relieve an itch(eight times since landing) or how many times I had coughed (three) or sneezed (seven) over the past few days.

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This post was written by CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton, who reported from China on the Sichuan earthquake, and now revisits some of the people she met there.
Read her Evening News report here.

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When reporting from a disaster zone, it’s often far too easy to reduce a entire event to a series of sterile numbers – the number of people killed, the dollar amount of damage done and precisely how long it will take for things to get back to normal.

China is home to one-fifth of the world’s population, so there’s an even stronger temptation for reporters here to allow huge numbers to dominate a major story: Sichuan’s earthquake left 80,000 dead, more than 8,000 missing and about 5 million homeless. Even people living near the quake’s epicenter had a hard time grasping the scale of what had happened.

So sometimes, it can help to focus on just a few individuals affected by a disaster. For more than two weeks in May, I worked with the tireless CBS News crew to highlight every angle of the Sichuan earthquake for our viewers back home. We met dozens of people throughout this chaotic period, but one stands out in my memory ...

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