The Pandemic vs. the IT Department

ElsaBorzoi wrote to mention a Network World article suggesting some pandemic preparations for your IT department. From the article: "A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their business, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place. The poll sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy found that close to two thirds said they were already prepared or somewhat prepared to move employees to remote locations or let them work at home, while 29% said they were not prepared. The H5N1 influenza virus, which originated in Asia, could hit the U.S. this fall, potentially causing an epidemic, the nation's chief avian flu coordinator warned."

Comments

Lacking sense: priorities

[bigberk]

Let's get something clear, "pandemic" doesn't mean a flu that is afflicting employees, so they get a little sniffle and stay home from work until they get better. A mutated H5N1 or similar pandemic, that spreads human to human with something like 50% mortality rate means that public places become a death trap. If you catch the bug and are unable to recover from it, you need to be treated at a hospital... except the hospitals are totally full and there aren't enough health care workers. Have you seen how the major cities are trying to plan for a "pandemic" situation? They are talking about how to deal with piles of corpses once the graveyards are full.

PUBLIC DOESN'T GET IT. If there is a pandemic, you don't go to work. You don't go to the mall, you don't go to school and you don't go out partying on the weekend. This is serious stuff. It hasn't happened yet and let's pray that it does not happen (easy human-to-human spread of lethal virus) but the situation at the IT department is totally irrelevant. Go to your job if you want to die.

Re:Lacking sense: priorities

[scottv67]

If there is a pandemic, you don't go to work.

But what about those of us who work in the I.T. depts of healthcare providers? Wouldn't you want us to go to work during the "pandemic" to make sure that things keep running to handle the large influx of patients at clinics and hospitals?

Somebody's got to be at work to make sure that when you or a relative shows up at the hospital, your electronic records can be accessed, imaging applications are working correctly and medications can be dispensed.

Re:Lacking sense: priorities

[Baddas]

The disparity lies in the fact that some portion of the people who fall ill do not require (or recieve, however one looks at it) hospitalization, either through fast onset of morbidity and mortality (unable to get to a hospital in a town with even fewer ambulances than hospital beds), or through having a lower level of symptoms (not needing hospitalization at all).

For "normal" flu, this level is approximately 1%. However, if we extrapolate from the fact that pandemic flu (of whatever type, be it bird flu or the 1918 flu) often has a mortality rate 25 times that of normal flu (0.1% vs 2.5% for 1918) then you can see that perhaps a quarter of the people would be hospitalized.

Again, this is all guesswork, and either way it's entirely beyond any theoretical capability of the medical system to cope with.

If it is not a big deal, then why all the panic?

[frank249]

Each year between 50 - 100 people per million of population die from the various forms of influenza that are commonly refered to as flu. Since 1997, only 50 people who had close contact with birds have died from Avian flu. The media is full of reports that this flu has the potential to become a pandemic. If so, it could kill between 5 to 250 million people. Most likely it will only be 5 people ... but it could be 250 million!

So wait a minute, doesn't every disease have the chance to mutate into something much worse not just avian flu? AIDs is incurable, has infected hundreds of millions and is transmited only by contact. What if it mutated so it was spread airborne? Everyday millions of bad things could happen but don't and we are not panicking over all of them.

So ask yourself why all the fuss? What is going on that could benefit from people being distracted?

Could it be the war in Iraq, scandals, economy, politics? Take your pick. We should be demanding the media to focus on the real issues and hold the politician's feet to the fire and not be distracted by nonissues.