“Why You Should Care About Indonesia”
Scott McPherson wrote an excellent article, and I highly recommend that you read it in its entirety. Here’s just one excerpt:
Bottom line: Learn to perform your own surveillance and prepare to make good decisions about what is going on. No one is going to snap his/her fingers and begin the pandemic. There will be an interlude before all Hell breaks loose. Learn how to recognize when that interlude starts and the orchestra is warming up, about to play the overture to the first act.
Look at where your organization’s planning effort fails: usually, in terms of the event’s duration. Most disaster recovery and continuity of ops plans have an event window of 72 hours to one week. Pandemics come in waves, and each wave can last up to three months. If your BCP/DR plans do not have at least a one-month event horizon, they will fail.
Pull your old Y2K supply-chain failure tab out and update it. Then put it into your pandemic plan binder. Y2K was a superb exercise for events such as a pandemic. Just think of a pandemic as Y2K where the people fail, not the computers.
Forget vaccines and antivirals during a pandemic. Focus on the Things Momma Taught Us instead. They are:
- Wash your hands! Especially when you go to the potty.
- Cough or sneeze into your sleeve, not your hands or into the air.
- Keep a respectable distance from strangers.
These three basic steps, coupled with prodigious use of hand sanitizer and vinyl gloves, will save more lives in a pandemic than vaccine and antivirals combined. And these rules hold true for regular flu season, too. Enforce them.
Guess I’m not the only one that is very alarmed at what has been happening in Indonesia and the ramifications for the rest of us.
