Financial Services Firms Simulate Flu Pandemic 150
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How useful is that? (Score:4, Insightful)
This cracks me up like you wouldn't believe. Think about it for a moment.
Why just Financial Service firms (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
The feds are simply acting responsibile, and seeing what will be the general reaction.
Re:Why just Financial Service firms (Score:2, Insightful)
After 9/11 in NYC, there was a mini panic because the ATM system was down locally for a while. Imagine if it was down for a week or longer. And the local branch is closed because the tellers are out sick. Do you carry enough cash to carry you through the week. Do you even HAVE checks? Many don't.
Also, the Feds maintain some level of control over the financial institutions - if the SEC orders them to do the exercise, they'll do it. Who is going to order food distribution companies to do it? The FDA? Maybe the ICC? Just because planning like this can't be done universally doesn't mean it shouldn't be done locally.
Why are you assuming people are going to work? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:How useful is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Did a test like this years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
It means that your disaster recovery is very bad, and the organization should give more people access to the recovery tools needed for these things.
Re:How useful is that? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have read that Tamiflu is excreted essentially unchanged in your urine.
If it comes down to life and death keep that in mind.
Re:Preparation isn't a waste of time (Score:2, Insightful)
"Although anthrax spores and smallpox aren't paint chips, the masks do provide protection against bioterrorism, since the most likely used bacterium would be dispersed in particle form, Utgoff says. In fact, the anthrax mail attacks first spotlighted the N95, as office mailrooms scurried for protective gear.
The N95 is made by various manufacturers under different names, from MSA's "Affinity Foldable Respirator" to 3M's "Particulate Respirator." Look for "NIOSH N95" on the package; the "N95" is a government efficiency rating that means the mask blocks about 95 percent of particles that are 0.3 microns in size or larger.
The N95 rating meets the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for protection against tuberculosis and anthrax spores, as well as the most foreseeable bioweaponry, which ranges in size from 1.0 to 5.0 microns. So the N95s are more than capable of preventing their inhalation."
The flu virus comes under those sizes as well. The rest of the articcle points out the masks shortcomings for other attacks, and errors in useage, but this topic is flu, and using ANY equipment improperly is a first class ticket to the Darwin's.
Ulterior Motive is to keep people afraid (Score:3, Insightful)
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.