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.'"

Re:The real question

[Otter]

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 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.

Re:What Pandemic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.. Well I hate to call you stupid but...

This is about the "regular" flu! They were simulating what would happen if a sizable portion of their workforce get sick with the flu and aren't able to work (not die, just unable to work). What article were you reading (or not reading)? Hell what SUMMARY were you reading? WHAT HEADLINE? No where is the bird flu mentioned.

Re:What Pandemic?

[ScentCone]

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.

Are you REALLY that clueless, or are you just trolling because you think you're scoring some anti-the-current-administration points, somehow?

The last real doozy of a flu pandemic killed 50-100 MILLION people [wikipedia.org] - most of whom were young, and otherwise healthy. This isn't like a once every 50 millions years asteroid collision we're talking about. Plenty of people alive right now were around when the last one happened, and lost family members. It was real. And that one happened before ubiquitous air travel between continents. We now have vastly more dense population centers, and arguably a much more fragile "just-in-time" style economy. Pretending this isn't a risk is foolish. Pretending that it's only hype from your political opponents is childish.

Re:What Pandemic?

[l-ascorbic]

I don't think the World Health Organisation is interested in scaremongering and taking the public's mind of domestic politics. Their take: "The risk of pandemic influenza is serious" [who.int].

During past pandemics, attack rates reached 25-35% of the total population. Under the best circumstances, assuming that the new virus causes mild disease, the world could still experience an estimated 2 million to 7.4 million deaths (projected from data obtained during the 1957 pandemic). Projections for a more virulent virus are much higher. The 1918 pandemic, which was exceptional, killed at least 40 million people. In the USA, the mortality rate during that pandemic was around 2.5%.

Think about it.

Re:How useful is that?

[OriginalArlen]

Whilst I'm not quite so cynical about the value of such exercises (they will tend to bring SOME unexpected problems to light; it's just that you can't guarantee that they'll find all the bugs in the process) the major problem is with the realism of what they're simulating. I did a lot of research into this a couple of years back (our then head of security said "We don't need to worry -- we have a stock of Tamiflu", and I ended up reading the clinical trial results and the datasheets for the stuff, as well as the major respectable papers on the topic. The was a dedicated issue in, I think, Nature (or it may have be> Oh BTW: the mortality rate en Science, or the BMJ - I forget), and another which was genuinely frightening (without trying to be) in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Note to the cynics -- these are about the most respected non-specialist journals of record in the relevant fields. If you're one of those "Avian flu? Pffft, Duke Nukem will arrive first" types, I advise you to go and talk to virologists and epidemiologists before talking crap about a subject you know nothing about) - Suffice to say Tamiflu increases the survival rate to about 45% -- from 35-40% when untreated. So more than half the people who get infected will die. )

Where was I?

Oh yes - right - 12 weeks. 12 weeks is a reasonable time frame for a single epidemic wave to cover the nation and then subside again. However the duration of the emergency is unlikely to be less than a year (the 1918 pandemic lasted a couple of years), during which time there will be multiple waves of infection in a localised population. Bear in mind that when the second wave arrives, you have n-(i*m) staff at the start of the wave (n = number of staff, i = infection rate, m=mortality rate.) And as seeing 10-20% of one's colleagues dying unpleasantly from a highly contagious disease is unlikely to increase people's enthusiasm for coming to work in an office, it's likely there'd be a huge economic hit that would take years to work it's way through - even after a free vaccine's being distributed by the U.N.

Re:What Pandemic?

[sane?]

Google the phrase "cytokine storm" if you don't already know why pandemic flu is different.

Re:How useful is that?

[archen]

I've actually gone through a few scenarios with the flew outbreak. Where I work we've had times when our workforce has been cut by 50% by blizzard conditions. Our facility actually did function alright, however there's no way we could sustain that over say; two weeks.

I also did some thinking about how to punch holes in the firewall and allow people to work remotely from home and such. The problem is that the network is simply going to buckle and die - if not at our T1, before then. Sure test it all you want, but what happens when EVERYONE decides to telecommute in order to keep things working? It's like 9/11. We're a company in northern PA and were putting a new accounting system into production. Well we had problems and needed outside help from the programmers across the country - just phone support mind you. Unfortunately all phone lines were down. If you had told me that blowing up two buildings in NYC would take down phone access at our company I would have laughed at you - now I really have little hope that initially anyone would be prepared for any large scale disaster.

Personally I'm just trying to figure out what to do about keyboards. Someone is going to come in sick and cough crap up into these things. I mean it's a biohazard waiting to happen, and as an IT person you're going to have to touch more than most people. I guess gloves will be alright for a while, but we'll probably have to throw out keyboards for just about everyone in the end. Huge pain in the ass that will be.

Re:What Pandemic?

[ScentCone]

Fear mongering and talking about the destruction caused by the Spanish lady without framing it in these terms does everyone a disservice.

Compared to, say, describing simulations that test a financial institution's ability to function with a partially absent workforce as some sort of conspiracy to distract the masses from politics? Come, now.

As for people being "weakened by war" in 1918... well, sure - that took a toll. But the deaths from that strain were mostly found in people with very HEALTHY immune systems. TOO healthy, as it turns out. The mechanism of death with an immune system response so robust that it, itself, actually killed the victims. As for your take on the numbers: let's say that "only" 5 million deaths out of a 100-million death pandemic were to occur in US cities. That's out of, of course, MANY more millions that would be sick and not die, or absent from work for fear of becoming sick. It's not fear-mongering to confront that scenario and think through how to deal with it, or at least mitigate it.

Face masks are a waste of time

[Toffins]

Most flu infections are not transmitted by breathing in airborne virus particles.
The commonest route of flu infection is actually

• by touching shared surfaces such as door handles, toilets, items of furniture, coins and notes, doors, windows and seats especially those in taxis and other forms of public transportation, and
  
  
• by not washing and disinfecting your hands afterwards before touching things that go in your mouth such as food, drink containers, toothbrushes, etc.

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.