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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.'"
Unfortunately this simulation is a bit... unsound. Not everyone that catches the flu shows symptoms, nor do they miss work. Instead, they just infect those that they work with, and I don't seen anything in the article that leads me to believe that they're factoring this in.
This might be an interesting study, but the money might be better spent just reminding people to wash their hands frequently. That simple act alone can save billions of dollars nationwide in time lost due to illness in the workplace.
It's disgusting how many people will sneeze, use the bathroom, whatever, and don't wash their hands afterwards.
> participants will gather in conference rooms
This cracks me up like you wouldn't believe. Think about it for a moment.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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 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.
I assume that these figures are for human infection with the existing H5N1 bird flu. It is worth pointing out that we don't know what the mortality rate of the eventual human pandemic will be, since the virus isn't here yet.
As an FYI,
I have read that Tamiflu is excreted essentially unchanged in your urine.
If it comes down to life and death keep that in mind.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.