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.'"

Comments

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Huh?

[Applekid]

The ulterior motive is to quantify how expensive it would be for the economy if a flu pandemic hits. That data could be used in cost-benefit analysis for vaccinations and vaccine stockpiles.

Though, that's not much of an ulterior motive. It sure beats releasing diseases into the populace to find out, that's for sure.

I mean, come on, nobody could be THAT evil.

(oblig. scene of Mr. Burns laughing at a worker hanging on for dear life outside his window)

My company is doing the same.

[FatSean]

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.

Did a test like this years ago

[eaddict]

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.

What Pandemic?

[frank249]

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.

Re:What Pandemic?

[Puls4r]

It goes beyond that. We have moved away from a farm-based economy. Back then, many folks new how to grow their own food, or had access to people who did. They knew how to save food, had access to well-water that did not need pumps, etc. If there was a flu pandemic that actually created a breakdown in services, people would begin to die within 2 weeks due to stravation. Sooner due to poison / bad water supplies - or worse if the power dropped out, NO water. The original poster has to be a troll. Us folks up in the Northeast understand a bit about what will happen - the blackout several years ago showed just how fragile modern society is. Without power - gas could not be pumped. Without gas, cars and trucks did not move. Without cars and trucks, NO one showed up for work, NO deliveries were made to the supermarket. Everything in your fridge rotted inside a week. If you were lucky, like me, you live in the country and have a well where you can get water from without an electrically powered pump. If you weren't lucky, you were stuck buying bottled water - then after that you were drinking out of the tank on the back of your toilet. That's only when a small PART of the country lost power. I can't believe these idiots are running this type of simulation. If there is a flu pandemic, NO ONE is going to be going to work. Army folks who are called back aren't going to show, and the country is going to go to hell in a handbasket.

Re:How useful is that?

[Harmonious Botch]

Underneath the Hilton sarcasm, P has a valid point. How useful is this, really?

participants will gather in conference rooms and assess how their businesses would be affected if a bird flu outbreak or other pandemic resulted in major reductions in the number of available employees. Note they are not doing any real-world testing of what would happen. No, they are sitting in conference rooms talking about what they think would happen.

sounds incomplete

[khallow]

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.

Re:sounds incomplete

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even weirder than that. My organization has policies in place, including issuing surgical masks to employees to wear during work. When questioned about why N95 masks wouldn't be issued (seeing as they are proven to be more effective), I was told that, since N95's are technically respirators, special training would need to be given, and we don't have the resources. Else we were open to liability if someone with asthma or a heart condition dies. So I say, "well, that's fine, but I'm wearing my own N95"

Actual response: "You will be sent home, or disciplined if you refuse, on the grounds of wearing inapprpriate clothing, the same as if you came in wearing just a jockstrap. We can't afford to have other employees seeing you with better respiratory equipment and asking why you are wearing it and not them. It opens us up to liability of not providing proper equipment"

So they are unwilling to be sued for a random heart attack, but are wiling to be liable for an unlawful termination suit from me and hundreads, if not thousands, of negligence suits from everyone in the organization who dies while not wearing an surgical mask provided by their employer, which is known to be inadequate protection.

Fucking pussies.
(Posted AC because I think someone will figure out who I am - I actually do like my job, just not some of the idiots I work with)

Preparation isn't a waste of time

[R2.0]

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.

Re:The real question

[networkBoy]

Not everyone that catches the flu shows symptoms, nor do they miss work. Instead, they just infect those that they work with, True. In the case of a pandemic flu my employer has a policy in place that admittance to the workplace will be on a need-only basis. In other words, if you are HR, finance, marketing, engineering, etc. you don't come in. You work from home till the pandemic is passed. In my case I do machine maintenance and code development. I would work from home unless something was broken, then I would go in.
-nB