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.'"
How useful is that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How useful is that? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How useful is that? (Score:4, Insightful)
This cracks me up like you wouldn't believe. Think about it for a moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How useful is that? (Score:5, Informative)
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: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: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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can't help but to have a single mental image drawn from both your message and your sig.
Eww.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It turns out that someone has actually done this. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=282747&cid=2 [slashdot.org]
Flu (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How useful is that? (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Did a test like this years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'd keep a pocket full of different colored marbles just in case a test like this came up again...
Employee: "Interesting, Mr. Smith, MyLongNickName has drawn a green marble 13 times in a row! What are the odds"
Mr. Smith: "Very Interesting. We've only had 7 disaster recovery tests."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Simulation we REALLY need to run (Score:4, Funny)
"Awww, man, it's just a little bite. Let me finish this backup and .
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Your Brains [jonathancoulton.com] by Jonathan Coulton.
Truly, an anthem for the modern age.
Wha? (Score:3, Funny)
But, don't we already have zombies in the Customer Support lines?
Re: (Score:2)
If you could keep operating in, say, the environment of the movie 28 Days Later I imagine more realistic disasters wouldn't be a challenge.
Re: (Score:2)
In all seriousness though, this is a two sided issue, it's not just decreased workforce, it is also decreased customer base - which no one seems to be considering.
Re: (Score:2)
We need to see how companies can hold up during a zombie infestation.
Mny of the big corporates would do just fine. OTOH if the zombies were wiped out they'd lose 80% of their current workforce.
What Pandemic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What Pandemic? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
a) That particular pandemic took off in large part because of weakened populations after a war. Plague tends to follow wars.
b) It killed that many people *worldwide*. Localized impact, while potentially still bad, was substantially more distributed than that. Saying that it killed "50 million people" begs the question of "where."
Are you familiar with the Swine Flu Affair? We need to be looking at not just the potential impact of a "Category 5 Pandemic" (1.8+ million dead) but also at the probabili
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 immun
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's because you're not getting the historical context of the term "begging" and how it got put to use in this phrase. Regardless...
It seems much more appropriate to the common vernacular
Sort of like the popular vernacular that says "I could care less," when what the person actually means is that they "couldn't care less?" People say four words that mean the opposite of
Re: (Score:2)
I'm gonna go ahead and right Japan off right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Their immune system was strong enough to go completely psycho and essentially dissolve their own cells trying to fight the flu while older people couldn't muster that strong a response.
But you are correct- huge numbers killed. In part because of army camps but today substitute airplanes and cube farms.
We depend on JIT inventory way to heavily.
Re: (Score:2)
No air travel, but as the article below points out, we did have rail travel, and we had WWI -- which helped incubate a far more serious strain of influenza than we might other wise have had: http://www.washingtonpo [washingtonpost.com]
Politicians Exploiting Real Risks (Score:2)
I can't say that this has never been what the Pandemic Flu scares were about, because early on there were some serious
Re: (Score:2)
Oh please. Among other things, my firm consults on disaster recovery. Many of our (east coast, in particular) customers work with us specifically with weather-related disruptions in mind (hurricanes, blizzards, etc). Off site backups, telecommuting through portals hosted at data centers, etc. They are only just now beginning to ask themselves how they'd function if a large percentage of their employees were either sick or wor
Re: (Score:2)
But th
Re:What Pandemic? (Score:4, Informative)
Think about it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Quant Question (Score:2)
Followup question (assuming top question was answered correctly:
You have chosen to infect "the other city" with the pandemic flu, estimate how long your competitive advantage will last (assume you have X employees).
Why just Financial Service firms (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What this means that if there were an pandemic flu, and 30% of everybody were unable to work, even if every single non-sick member of the military were put to work driving trucks (generals, intelligence, computer specialists, etc.) they'd only just be able to keep the number of truckers constant. Now when you take into account that a large portion of the military isn't in the US
Re: (Score:2)
nonsense (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thank goodness 50% of your customers will be out of commision too!
Yeah, but it will be the nice 50%. You'll have super concentrated a-hole customers left over. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Once food stops showing up in grocery stores people get fighting mad awful quick.
Re: (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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Effective Scare-Mongering and Consulting Fees (Score:2)
The computer consultants have a lot easie
sounds incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:sounds incomplete (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re: (Score:2)
They'll probably let you go home if you're sick, but a shocking percentage of workers think they'll get chastized/fired if they miss work due to genuine illness..and some companies do this.
Some companies require a fucking doctor's note or they'll count each absense against you. That's at least $20 every time you're out, or else..and standing in line with a bunch of other sick people, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
/snicker
Preparation isn't a waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Meh. Your math is off, since those sets intersect.
If 25% get infected, and 25% need to care for sick loved ones, you're talking about 43.75% reduction in workforce, not 50%.
Doomsayer. Way to blow it out of proportion with your fuzzy maths and your nice round numbers.
Seriously, though, 25% or 50% reduction in workforce, it doesn't matter -- the economy will be crippled. Don't f
Re: (Score:2)
If 25% get infected, and 25% need to care for sick loved ones, you're talking about 43.75% reduction in workforce, not 50%.
If you're talking about something that nasty. the overlap between the two sets will be smaller than expected. Namely, the sick will be unlikely to have the energy to care for others. In some of the 1918 stories (as I recall, of course), there are cases where entire households became bedridden and they only survived because of help from a neighbor. As I recall, in the book, "The Plag
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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 pac
Face masks are a waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Just in tie for 911 (Score:2)
I really don't trust our government doing simulations anymore.
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: (Score:2)
Because of the time delay. You'll be symptom-free for a day or two after the initial infection and your doomed coworkers won't die for several more days. Are you really likely to figure out that this is the next pandemic flu before your coworkers expose you to it?
Re: (Score:2)
Agree: all will stay home. See SARS in Toronto (Score:2)
The majority of these people who stayed home weren't having symptoms.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually - it's the people who don't go back to work are not in their right minds. No matter what happens, if I don't have that paycheck I don't have a house, car, or food.
Military folks are not going to r
Knock on effects (Score:2)
One of the major problems in these types of simulation are that no knock on effects are simulated. The assumption is made that people will continue to come into work and will indeed work to someone else's plan. In reality people will look after themselves and their family, which will mean closing the door and staying at home. Work will be unimportant; who would seriously take that degree of risk for a meagre salary.
At our rough calculations the transition from business as usual to total shutdown will take
The Stand (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Why financial services? (Score:2)
Wait...you're a little sideways, here... (Score:2)
Like at the end of the DotComBoom, the recent housing(lending) problem, and any other panic situations. Panic is panic; those involved will always operate the same way: based on fear, not facts.
Sick and dying people... (Score:2)
Another good reason for telecommuting (Score:2)
If not for the obvious social benefits, cost reduction, or for employee satisfaction, pandemic preparedness is a good enough reason to permit telecommuting wherever practical. In the event it's necessary, only those who telecommute already will be at 100% productivity. The rest will not have developed the necessary work habits or adapted to the different communication strategies needed to successfully telecommute. They also may not have the resources they need in place at home, and depending on how bad thin
My company is doing the same. (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Been there, done that (Score:2)
Not mentioned there, but at least one person died from this.
Re: (Score:2)
I am not flaming you, but what history books are you reading?
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 t
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
The feds are simply acting responsibile, and seeing what will be the general reaction.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sucker.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know why this gets modded as insightful.
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 fee
Re:Telecommute? Maybe... Maybe Not (Score:4, Funny)
- 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:The real question (Score:4, Interesting)
-nB
Re:The real question (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I work at a small company with 2 other techs and they recently went to a conference for a few days... That was fun, I can tell you. If that happened for 2 weeks they'd probably come back as the only 2 techs left.