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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.'"
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
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 .
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.
Goofing off on Slashdot at work vs. goofing off on slashdot at home through while pretending to work via the VPN connection shouldn't affect traffic levels.
This isn't a simulation of flu transmission, it's a simulation of how your company works when a third of the people are telecommuting and another third are dead.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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 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)
More Twoson than Cupertino
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?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
See, I used to simulate the flu all the time... I have found that it was quite useful, until my parents caught on.
- 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'm not worried. I'm certain that I am immune to Captain Trips. Which city I end up going to, is another matter entirely.
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
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.