FARMINGTON — When you start planning for an influenza outbreak of pandemic proportions, you have to ask "What if?" a lot.

If pandemic flu were to strike Davis County, how would the Davis School District continue to educate students if 25 percent of the 60,000 students and 6,000 staff couldn't come to school? If teachers can't come to school, can they still get paid? Could the district deliver its curriculum in a non-traditional way?

These are among the questions that Scott Zigich, the school district's risk manager, will eventually need to answer. "We've got a lot of work to do," Zigich said.

The school district and Davis County Health Department teamed up recently to go through scenarios involving pandemic flu. Pandemic flu is not the regular flu people get inoculated against every year, said health department director Lewis Garrett. Influenza reaches pandemic status when it's lethal, no one has immunity to it and it's highly contagious.

"As soon as public-health surveillance picks up on a problem, that's when we open the dialogue immediately with our counterparts at the school district," Garrett said.

The avian flu may be that problem, but that strain, known as H5N1, hasn't been spread human to human yet, Garrett said.

"It kills over half the people who have been infected," Garrett said. "I've never seen public-health people watching something as carefully as they're watching this."

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E-mail: jdougherty@desnews.com