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Financial Services Firms Simulate Flu Pandemic
jcatcw writes "The U.S. Government is co-sponsoring a three-week exercise that will simulate the impact of a flu pandemic on financial services firms, including their ability to support telecommuters. The exercise is expected to be the largest in U.S. history and will involve more than 1,800 firms. From the article: 'The program will follow a compressed time frame that simulates the impact of a 12-week pandemic wave. Participants will be given information on how many absentee employees they can expect. Companies won't know exactly how hard they will be hit with sick-calls from employees until this data is made available ... In addition, participating firms won't be able to pick and choose the level of workforce reductions they get hit by.'"
Familiar with the plot of V for Vendetta?
I'm assuming there's some ulterior motive for this, this is the US government we're talking about, but I'm really unclear as to what it might be. Stave off a catastrophic market crash by severely slowing trading? Or what?
We got the call a few months ago that our systems need to be 'pandemic-resilient' by the end of the next devel-deploy cycle. Basically, your average multiple-geography high-availability solutions will serve. I guess the plan is that if one datacenter goes away, the others will pick up the work with no interruption.
Interesting stuff.
Blar.
Why not simulate the impact of Paris Hilton going naked down the street with the words "Google RULES" painted onto her butt cheeks? I'm sure that will have a definate impact on their stock.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Is Slashdot ready for all these additional telecommuters?
Would Slashdot be Fludotted? (fludotted - ick)
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
When I worked at a financial institution we had a disaster recovery test where when the employees came to work they drew a marble out of a bucket. One color meant go home - you were unavailable for work. The other meant you were OK and could work. Made for an interesting day. The IS dept I worked for at the time did have its stuff together and ran flawlessly at about 50%. Mind you, this was just to maintain business for the customers. We could NOT stay staffed at that level if ANYONE in the organization ever wanted to do more than just keep the boat afloat. I wish my existing employer would do something like this.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
We need to see how companies can hold up during a zombie infestation.
." BLAMMM!
"Awww, man, it's just a little bite. Let me finish this backup and .
The end result? We learned that we were having the training because "Awareness" was the first step in their plan, should there be a pandemic.... but no other portion of the plan had been completed yet. Needless to say - if there's actually an outbreak, my company, along with many others (IMO) would be screwed.
Why all this concern for something that might happen[but probally won't]? 10 people who live with chickens may die[it could be 1 million!] but likely 10. What surprises me is that 30,000 people die each year in the US from the regular flu but no one seems to be concerned. Millions have died from HIV/AIDS but yet infected people cannot be restricted from having unprotected sex with uninfected people. There is likely a greater chance to be hit by an asteroid yet NASA's sky watch program is being cut. My guess that all this pandemic talk is just more fear mongering to take the public's mind off of politics and the economy is more likely.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
There are 100 firms based in NY with an average of Z traders while only 30 firms (each with an average of W traders) based in SF. Assume the spread factor of a pandemic is \mu. You have a pandemic flu virus at your disposal, what is your winning strategy for basing your headquarters and why?
Followup question (assuming top question was answered correctly:
You have chosen to infect "the other city" with the pandemic flu, estimate how long your competitive advantage will last (assume you have X employees).
Seriously, surely they wouldn't have as great an impact as say food re-distribution. I work for a major food re-distributer and if something knocked out 50% of our warehouse workers and truck drivers, it would certainly trickle down to our customers, I hate to think what would happen if vital services across the country were knocked down to 50% of normal workforce for a long period of time.
I got nuthin
The disease tracking is showing that diseases spread fast when a population gets overpopulated. Within the last 5 years, WHO has shown that simple flu now moves through the world in a matter of 1-2 weeks. It is a real indication that mother nature is about to do what she does to the top of the chain; ravage it via hunger and/or disease. Most likely, it will be a flu as it is difficult to distinguish from a cold, and the ease of transmission. WHO and CDC feel certain that either this season or next will be a big hit. At that time, the only real way to slow the spread is to keep everybody seperate. Those who work in factories will be a very high risk, The same is true of stores (lots of ppl passing by) and office will be the worse. But in the office, most can actually telicommute. That will slow the spread until a vaccine is developed, assuming that the new all encompassing flu vaccine does not work.
The feds are simply acting responsibile, and seeing what will be the general reaction.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think there's two further aspects to model here. First, what happens when people are sick, but show up anyway? Do the companies have policies in place to force these people home and will bosses and employees respect these policies? Second, do they have liability protection in case an employee (say a boss) forces people to show up and those people (or their families and many friends) get sick and possibly die? For example, if a boss forces a sick employee to stay in the department or forces an employee to come in (apparently the safest place you can be is to stay for a few weeks in a well-ventilated home or apartment with no contact with the outside world, showing up for work puts you at some risk, especially if you use public transportation or enter a public area like a store, say to pay for gas), there is the potential for the company to become liable for a large number of deaths, not just from the employees but also from the people they could infect down the road.
I work for a Very Large Charitable Organization in facilities construction, and our group has gotten involved in some of the pandemic flu planning. There are some truly frightening scenarios out there, from "Really Bad Flu Season", through "1918, Part II", to TEOTWAWKI.
The part where some of it hit home for me was when a coworker, who is our resident disaster junkie/survivalist, came back from his first panflu planning meeting. Normally he comes back from meetings grumbling that no one is taking a problem seriously. This time he was concerned that he himself hadn't been taking it seriously enough, and I've been to his bunker site!
Currently in Indonesia the mortality rate for bird flu cases is around 50%, and they are starting to see human to human transmission. If the lethality of the virus survives the mutation to a strain more transmissible between humans, one can assume that it will infect about 25% of the world populace - that was 1918 numbers, it will probably be more now with easy international travel and higher density in the cities.
So, if you sit in a pod of 8 cubicles, here's the breakdown (1918 transmissibility, current lethality)
1 of you is dead
1 of you is permanently disabled, or out for months of recovery
So now your workforce is reduced by 25% - oh, wait, 2 of you will also be out caring for sick loved ones, so that's half gone. And medical personnel are basically gone - they have been exposed multiple times and are either dead, sick, or not going to work because they don't want to become either (btw, that's not my projection, that's from the CDC).
Vaccine? Indonesia is not giving samples to international health authorities, for fears that any vaccine developed will be too expensive for them to afford (not a paranoid assumption)
Conclusion: Go buy some N95 masks and gloves (both cheap) and just pay a little attention. Neitehr will go to waste - use the gloves for working on cars and the masks for wood shop. And just pay attention.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
We need to see how companies can hold up during a zombie infestation.
But, don't we already have zombies in the Customer Support lines?
In our disaster recovery test, employees who drew a blue marble went home, while those who drew the white ones stayed and worked. In addition, we got to sacrifice whoever drew one black marble which made those of us who had to stay and work a little less jealous of those sent home.
"The U.S. Government is co-sponsoring a three-week exercise that will simulate..."
I really don't trust our government doing simulations anymore.
and they will share real results? :-)
VirtualWorldsHub.com - News, forums, resources
We happened to notice in the last pandemic simulation that you are completely expendable.... so please assume the role of a dead person. (no severance package)
Not mentioned there, but at least one person died from this.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I originally posted some of this as a reply to someone else, but I've seen so many folks posting things under the same assumption that I wanted to make a more generalized response.
Who, in their right mind, seeing 1/3 of the population dieing around them, in their houses, etc, is going to be going to work? Hospital workers will be dead. Military folks are not going to respond to being called-back, and frankly the close living quarters of the military is the best for spreading it around the force.
Folks, picture this. Your next door neighbor dies. The next day, co-workers start dieing. Are you going to go back to work?
Why are these "simulations" so naive that they believe folks will continue to work, rather than staying with their families? I'm not exactly and end-of-days kind of guys, but the folks on here discussing people telecommuting to work are insane. If half the people in the country are going to be dieing or caring for dieing folks, people aren't going to be worrying about how many strawberries are picked, cows are slaughtered, cars are made, or stocks are traded.
Businesses whose pandemic plans hinge on their workers' ability to telecommute may be in for a rude (and economically devastating) shock.
See, I used to simulate the flu all the time... I have found that it was quite useful, until my parents caught on.
One of the major problems in these types of simulation are that no knock on effects are simulated. The assumption is made that people will continue to come into work and will indeed work to someone else's plan. In reality people will look after themselves and their family, which will mean closing the door and staying at home. Work will be unimportant; who would seriously take that degree of risk for a meagre salary.
At our rough calculations the transition from business as usual to total shutdown will take two week max. As soon as the threat is recognised by the populous as real, people will react to save themselves.
Expect the various waves of pandemic flu to take a minimum of six months to run their course
- A way to access their work, securely. VPN, ssh, https are in places in a number of areas.
- A way to talk. VOIP and/or PSTN work wonders combined with IM and email.
- A willingness to accept it by all.
It is the last one that will be difficult for employees AND managers. A number of ppl like to separate their work from home. They will have to learn to set aside one room for work.As to the power grid, I am not too worried about it. The plants will have to work to keep their employees separated by distance, as well as consider how to keep them separate from the general populace. As to the powerload, I think that it will actually be just a bit more, not hugely more. The reason is that there will be less driving. In addition, the offices will have to run their fans constantly, but will AC and even light far less (and most large office buildings run AC during the day even in the winter due to computer and human heat).
One issue that I can see is the current trend in offices is to do smaller and small binnies. That means that everybody is closer. When something starts, the companies will have to be willing to move quickly to telecommuting. If not, they could lose a SIGNIFICANT chunk of their office workers in a very short time. Here at Verizon, they are cramming ppl into 1/4 of the space that we had back in the late 80's.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I modded someone down by accident. Posting here nulls that... g'day!
(pls just leave this unmodded @ 1? thanks)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Let's all sneeze in their direction at once...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
I'm not worried. I'm certain that I am immune to Captain Trips. Which city I end up going to, is another matter entirely.
When SARS struck Hong Kong, the effect in Toronto (Ontario) was considerable, as there is a significant population that travels between Hong Kong and Toronto. All the streets were dead, and you wouldn't see anyone walking the usually crowded downtown streets. (Well, there were a few, but a tiny fraction of the number.) Retail business drooped, and in fact some Chinese places (especially restaurants) went belly-up due to lack of income.
The majority of these people who stayed home weren't having symptoms. They just didn't want to start getting symptoms.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
See, that corrupt Bush administration is up to their _evil_ tricks again!!! I can't believe the guile of that band of crooks! How dare they... subvert the freedom of... the average American... financial services client.... Preparing the country for... a biological cri... crisis....
Sorry, habit, never mind.
sigfault (core dumped)
I doubt the power load will go up at all. After all, if these people are using computers at work, the power load won't be affected by their using computers at home; the total drain would be the same. And, I think it would actually drop, because there won't be as much photocopying being done. The average copier uses about 1 kW; and most companies have two or three of those.
What was once true, is no longer so
Biosecurity simulation based decision making is recieving a lot of funding in the US. See:t y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alok_Chaturvedi and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Biosecuri
Simulex Inc. is a modeling and simulation company located in Purdue Technology Park.[2] Its main sources of income are the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.. It was established in 1999 by Alok Chaturvedi and Shailendra Raj Mehta.[3]
Simulex Inc. creates synthetic decision situations using the SEAS technology developed at Purdue University in conjunction with funding from the National Science Foundation, Intel, 21st Century Fund, Office of Naval Research and other agencies. The technology recreates situations using human and artificial agents. It populates it with real data then allows data mining, decision support, forecasting, scenario planning and strategy planning. Millions of artificial agents represent behaviors (buying behavior of consumers, movement of trucks, contamination after a bio-terror attack, etc.) and hundreds of human players can make decisions (regarding production, advertising, recruiting, etc.) all in a real time, web-enabled, interactive environment.[3]
If a real flu pandemic came I'd be a lot more worried about water, electricity/gas and food than how my stocks are doing. Have they already done these simulations or are we getting more like the Golgafrinchams?
It doesn't so much simulate a flu panic, as much as it simulates a **PANIC**.
Like at the end of the DotComBoom, the recent housing(lending) problem, and any other panic situations. Panic is panic; those involved will always operate the same way: based on fear, not facts.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
But that hasn't been what the Pandemic Flu scares have been about, except for the first couple of months of the avian flu when there were some real concerns. The political side of the Bush Administration and the Homeland Security crowd want to keep the people afraid, whether it's afraid of terrorists or sick birds or married gay people, because that gives them political power they can use. The Pandemic Flu stuff has been how they've kept technology businesses helping keep people scared, and lets them reach a segment of the population who aren't as good at buying into the Moslem Terrorists scare or the married gay people scare. (Note that I didn't say "The Republicans" - some of these people are also partisan Republicans, and some of them are the civil-service or military types who've been helping the Administration's propaganda war for years, and the traditional Republicans weren't really into this sort of thing except when there were Commies to be scared of or nuclear weapons and Star Wars defenses to build.)
Of course there are businesses that are pushing this sort of thing for business reasons. Most of them are consultants (either individual or big-firm types) selling consulting services, or Internet-related companies that want to sell bandwidth or VPN appliances or data center space, and this is yet another way to make money along with exploiting earthquakes and hurricanes and Chicago tunnel floods and 9/11/01 and other infrastructure disasters to get customers to think about building reliable data infrastructures. But you may notice that the government keeps reminding businesses about how they need to prepare for Pandemic Flu, and doesn't keep reminding them that they need to prepare for hurricanes.
A lot of the recommendations that these exercises come out with seems trivial to people in the high-tech business, like making sure people can work from home, but as a friend of mine here in Silicon Valley says "Not only are you not an 'average computer user', but nobody you know is an 'average computer user' either." I've been doing some work from home since the days of 1200 baud modems, and for the last 15 years I've generally had field jobs that mean I need to be able to work just as well from a customer's office as well as my company's office, which means that I can just as well work from home as from the office unless I need specialized equipment like photocopies or the big laser printer or the padded boxes we use to mail computers in for hardware repairs, and while in-person meetings are nice, we usually just use conference bridges. There's some benefit into bullying old-style managers into giving their workers more flexibility and build some reliability into their data centers, and if it takes scaring them with the pandemic flu to do so I'll put up with a bit of it, but it's never really been about anything other than politics.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Nonsense. You can live without a stock market for six months. Try doing the same thing with your food supply. Having said that, I see no obvious reason that the stock market has to close (aside from possible short term anti-panic measures). Just transition it all online to greatly reduce person to person interaction.
Oh yeah, what will the companies do when people don't show up to work? Oh woe are those businesses. I feel so bad for them. That should be our first concern when people are sick and dying. Banks making money is obviously more important than people getting sick and dying. Pricks.
I can't say that this has never been what the Pandemic Flu scares were about, because early on there were some serious medical concerns, especially before we had enough experience to know what this flu was doing, and it's certainly a much more serious risk if you're in the poultry business or flu-vaccine buiness than if you're not. And while H5N1 doesn't appear to be a major human epidemic version of the flu, it's possible that a more virulent flu strain might evolve, and this flu has helped medical researchers learn more about how influenza works, which is legitimately scary stuff. And there are people in the US government and the UN WHO who really do care about stopping disease.
But this scare-mongering has overwhelmingly been driven by the political scaremongers, with a bit of help from computer consultants who make money helping customers assess and mitigate various threats. You don't see the same constant consistent warnings about Hurricane Preparedness, even though the computer consultants have a lot more frequent hurricanes and earthquakes to deal with than pandemics. (That might change if an environmentalist Democrat gets elected, since "Global Warming Causes More Hurricanes" is a good scare story too, and "Republicans are Incompetent at Hurricane Preparedness and Democrats Aren't" is potentially useful as well.)
Also, you don't see the government putting the same level of effort into stopping medical problems that they _can_ easily do things about but are politically incorrect. It's not just having public-school sex education courses talk about using condoms to prevent pregnancy and disease transmission instead of the politically correct scientific technique of "hoping teenagers will always stop at third base". Sure, they're not 100% effective, but having women get cervical cancer because of the HPV epidemic isn't an appropriate response. It's things like getting rid of the laws against hypodermic needles, which were originally put there to improve public health by making injectable drug use more difficult but have had the effect of making needle-sharing prevalent, spreading AIDS and hepatitis and other diseases. Among other things, these laws interact especially badly with the US illegal-drug culture because prostitutes are often addicts, so the disease not only spreads among junkies but also prostitutes' customers and their other sex partners.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The commonest route of flu infection is actually
This is how most people get infected, and N95 face masks offer no protection against this.
Surfaces, especially damp or wet ones, easily become contaminated whenever a flu-infected person touches them or coughes or sneezes droplets of infected saliva or mucus onto them. Touching a flu-virus-contaminated surface is a very effective method of infecting yourself. It delivers a relatively massive dose of virus particles, several orders of magnitude more than by breathing contaminated air without wearing a face mask. Flu virus is extremely infectious by ingestion.
It is not true that flu is usually transmitted by airborne virus particles and that N95 face masks protect you against flu infection.
One of the countermeasures for a flu pandemic that is being considered is compulsory quarantine of infected people to prevent them coughing and sneezing their infected mucus and saliva onto public surfaces that would infect other people.
The computer consultants have a lot easier time selling to the financial industry, where there's a general recognition that business continuity is important, a strong auditing sector, and a willingness and ability to pay lots of money for services that can save them lots of money in case of relatively rare disasters. The trucking industry, on the other hand, will pay a bit of money for somebody to sell them reliable scheduling and inventory systems, but is much more concerned about threats like "Gas prices rise another $1/gallon" or "Mafia war in New York City changes protection rackets" or "Auditors investigate Teamsters Union Pension Fund".
And any time the scaremonger mob wants to yank the public's chain, they can put out an announcement about "Pandemic Flu Booga-Booga" and the consultant business acts as an amplifier by hitting up all their potential clients with well-publicized seminars, as opposed to saying "Unverified Terrorist Chatter Booga-Booga" which gets amplified by lots of local news stations interviewing local police and mayors about whether the local bridge or the propane tanks behind town hall might be on Al Qaeda's Top 10 Targets List". Also, it's a way to keep white-collar workers nervous and worried, which is sometimes harder, as opposed to the kind of scaremongering that works better for blue-collar Fox News audiences.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If not for the obvious social benefits, cost reduction, or for employee satisfaction, pandemic preparedness is a good enough reason to permit telecommuting wherever practical. In the event it's necessary, only those who telecommute already will be at 100% productivity. The rest will not have developed the necessary work habits or adapted to the different communication strategies needed to successfully telecommute. They also may not have the resources they need in place at home, and depending on how bad things are, they may not have the opportunity to correct the problem.
Not downsizing to the bone is a good preparedness measure as well. If things barely stay together when someone is on vacation, it will come apart when 25-50% are out sick.
Cross training is a decent idea as well. It won't help a bank at all if it's back office remains perfectly functional if nobody there knows how to reload the ATM or retrieve the deposit envelopes (or even where the key is!). Little things nobody thinks about like where the cleaning supplies are kept could be important during a pandemic. Frequent cleaning with disinfectants will be a must.
Distributors and logistics companies will want to make sure the executives can drive a forklift without skewering someone if needed.
I certainly would call in sick even if I weren't. Who wants to work in an air-conditioned shared office when there's a flu pandemia?
... I work in a fully stocked fall-out shelter.
Seriously, I do. Of course, I don't know how that will help the rest of my family...
Anyway, I wonder how many people have every actually experienced an environment where there's been a total breakdown in civil services. If there is one due to a pandemic, it will be scary.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
I think you might be very surprised at how much value comes out of running these types of simulations. I work in the tech field and that side of the story is easy to imagine but as I worked with economists and academia it gave me a new appreciation that I would like to share with you.
Pre-Y2k, the government wanted to plan for the "Systemic Perturbations" that could come out of the Y2k bug. The US Gov't said to its top economists, military leaders: "Assume it is going to be bad, the worst case scenario." For once, perhaps the first time in history, we knew beforehand WHAT the vertical shock to the system was going to be and on what date and time it was going to happen. This gave the discussion a very real sense of importance because it wasn't hypothetical. In disaster planing, you don't know what the vertical shock is going to be-- think of a rock hitting a pond, you don't know how big the rock will be or when, where it will hit, and from a planning scenario it doesn't matter because what you need to plan for is how to deal with the huge splash it creates and the waves and ripples it creates. Once you have created plans to deal with the splash and ripples, what they term as "System Perturbations" you are then ready for any vertical shock (rock hitting pond) to the system. The rock can hit anywhere and be any size. We already know how to respond to the splash and run all the ripples to ground.
So, with Y2k, the Pentagon engaged with a global financial firm of Cantor Fitzgerald to plan for the vertical shock of Y2k and what sort of rule set resets are going to take place. If Y2k was going to be big, Banks failing, power outages, trading stops, mass chaos, martial law... what would be the GLOBAL impact of such massive chaos. Interestingly, Cantor Fitzgerald stated: "I think we've seen this before, in China, with SARS."
Huh? What does China and SARS have to do with Y2k bug?
The Chinese healthcare system, and by extension their entire government was very closed about revealing any of their internal problems. When the SARS outbreak happened, Chinese authorities ignored the problem. When SARS started spreading, the World Health Organization (WHO) started inquiring with China about the outbreaks and extent of the spread within China. China flat denied that any problem existed. When people started dying, the WHO shut down all flights leaving certain Chinese provinces suspected of spreading SARS. This had a DIRECT impact on the Chinese economy and government.
The Chinese immediately responded. "AH, roo mean SARS! Well, we have very much SARS!" To this day, there are police stationed at the airport that will approach any passenger and take their temperature on the spot. If you are running a fever, or you don't look 100% healthy, you don't fly. You've just won an extended 3 day vacation with all expenses paid by YOU because they don't ever want to run the risk of spreading disease and having their airports shut down again. This also started the Chinese equivalent of the CDC to start cooperating with the WHO, which is why we know about the H5N1 "Bird Fru" virus years before it has become a viable threat to humans.
The real lesson here was this: China received a vertical shock to their system. The direct result of that shock was rapid changes taking place to China's political system, changes that NEVER could have come about on their own absent the external influence. An external event causing internal change. Internal change that never could have come internally. Rapid policy changes that forever alter the way the country interacts with the outside world. This was huge.
The correlation to Y2k was the recognition that the vertical system shock to the global system would create unheard of system perturbations. The output of which would cause a permanent global policy change that would forever alter the rules by which governments interact with each other and how each government interacts with its own citizens. External events driving internal change.
Wel
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Typical of the GWB administration! Always in the past, the focus of pandemic prediction has been on the effect of a pandemic on the PUBLIC, and CITIZENS. Not on financial markets.
It is the people and small businesses that are important, the backbone of the economy. The People (the little guys) are what make this country work.
For some reason, GWB and friends think they can just concentrate on the rich and powerful, and ignore the little guy. But that has been tried before, and never works for very long. They might be able to get away with it for a few years, but eventually there will be a "correction".
Trying to predict the effect of a pandemic on the financial markets is a goddamned waste of time and money. This is the way it works: If there is a pandemic, markets will fail. Period. Because the people who actually make it work will be beset by too many problems.
A helpful guide to pandemic preparedness can be downloaded at: http://www.pandemicinfosite.com/