Swine flu national emergency should spur businesses to action

Computerworld - President Barack Obama declared the H1N1 flu outbreak a national emergency this past weekend, giving health care systems the ability to bypass some federal regulatory requirements in order to quickly implement disaster plans should they become overwhelmed.

Similar to declaring a hurricane emergency as a storm approaches landfall, the national emergency declaration gives health care facilities the authority to submit waivers to establish alternate care sites, as well as modified patient triage protocols, patient transfer procedures and other actions that occur when they fully implement disaster operations plans.

While the emergency declaration is targeted more at the government level, it should send up a red flag to the IT and business community, which is woefully unprepared from a technical and human resources standpoint to support employee absenteeism rates of 40% or more.

"Organizations probably have not allocated enough resources for virtual private networks nor tested VPNs for the fact that 80% of their staff could be working from home," said Al Berman, executive director of the Disaster Recovery Institute, a New York-based business training and certification body. "We ran some tests with companies, and they ran out of TCP/IP addresses in five minutes."

Berman said much of the issue surrounds the cost of additional VPN bandwidth. For example, his organization met with representatives from a large insurance provider recently that said it would cost $1 million to increase VPN bandwidth just to support 40% of its staff working from home.

According to FluView, a weekly influenza surveillance report prepared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1,000 people have died in the U.S. from swine flu, including more than 100 children, and 46 states have reported widespread influenza activity. The U.S. government has created a Web site that offers guidance to businesses in case of a pandemic. Some simple measures include ensuring that sick employees stay home.

"If a corporation is seeing higher rates of absenteeism, they should send a very strong message to employees to stay home if they're sick. No one is that essential," said Kim Elliott, deputy director of the Trust for America's Health, a Washington-based nonprofit public health advocacy group.

"If you don't pay employees for sick leave, you may want to rethink that policy. You don't want employees coming in and infecting others to the point where your business shuts down," she added.

Berman said he was recently in touch with a school system whose policy led to the failing of a student for three consecutive absences. "The incubation period for the flu is three to five days, so they're encouraging kids to come to school and spread the flu," he said.