In Depth

Planning for Pandemic

Former CIO Ed Carubis on what CSOs should be doing in light of the looming threat of an avian flu pandemic

By Sarah D. Scalet

February 01, 2006 — CSO —

The potential human toll of a bird flu pandemic is hard enough to contemplate, but the possible economic impact is also vast. CSOs (and all continuity planners) need to think ahead to keep their organizations—and the economy at large—working to the greatest extent possible. Ed Carubis, former CIO of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and now senior consultant to geospatial data company ESRI, spoke with Senior Editor Sarah D. Scalet and offered specific steps for CSOs to follow.

CSOs' first steps in preparing for an outbreak: Preparation starts with an assessment of the critical assets you'll need to manage effectively during an outbreak: employees and facilities. It's very important to do an assessment of the quality of the information your company is capturing about its employees and facilities.

A big part of that is spatial data, of course. Do you have precise addresses for employees? Can you display that information on a map? What about the details regarding facilities' locations and where they fit in your overall business process?

During emergencies you need to move from whatever your everyday organizational structure is—flat, hierarchical, et cetera—into a command-and-control structure. At the New York City Department of Health, we had a process—a skills assessment of all 6,000 employees to determine what role they would play in a major emergency. That's an important process for all corporations, not just those directly involved in emergency preparedness.

Possible quarantine scenarios: The recent national strategy that President Bush has put forward indicates that quarantine and community-based interventions may come into play. Those decisions potentially will have a very big impact on businesses. There may be "snow days," where the government asks the population at large to stay home for a few days, depending on how an outbreak is progressing. Or the government may ask everyone to stay home in a particular community where that outbreak is occurring.

You don't really know, depending on how a virus mutates, what the incubation period will be. Typically, viruses have an incubation period of 48 hours. To be safe, the [national strategy] guidelines call for a 10-day period, which is more than enough, in my opinion, to deal with most influenza-based outbreaks. The government may ask schools to close, and there are related child-care issues that a company's going to have to deal with. Another scenario is that the government may establish what they call working quarantine, whereby a set of individuals can go to work if they are medically screened on a daily basis. Typically this happens first in health-care settings. You'd rather have people stay at home, but in those critical areas like first responders, law enforcement, sanitation, public health, and the medical/health-care delivery system, you want as much as possible to keep those people working. In those areas particularly, a working quarantine approach may be suggested. Corporations need to build partnerships with the public health entity to see how that would play out.