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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.'"
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 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.