With as much fear as the worldwide outbreak of coronavirus has caused, not the least of which because of disruptions to the supply chain of numerous goods and medical supplies because of the effect the disease has had on global imports and exports, now might be the time for Wisconsin businesses of all sizes to start planning for the possibility of a pandemic that results in a quarantine.
While not yet widespread, the coronavirus has hit U.S. shores, with the latest reports showing 11 deaths linked to the virus, with 162 confirmed cases in 18 states across the country — including one confirmed case so far in Wisconsin. Washington state, which has so far been hardest hit, has already begun imposing soft quarantines of densely populated areas to try to contain the spread of the virus. This is all in addition to the more than 90,000 confirmed cases and 3,000 deaths worldwide from the disease.
By comparison, influenza — known as the common flu — has infected as many as 45 million Americans since October and killed as many as 46,000, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, though the two diseases present similarly, far less is currently known about the much newer coronavirus (COVID-19) than the flu, except for this — while the flu is dangerous with a mortality of 0.1 percent, COVID-19 is exponentially more deadly.
Though doctors are still learning more about COVID-19 each day, the New England Journal of Medicine announced last week a death rate of 1.4 percent among a group of 1,099 patients. That could be a best-case scenario, however. According to a World Health Organization briefing March 3, the global case fatality rate for the coronavirus is believed to be about 3.4 percent, higher than the 2.3 percent reported in a China CDC study released in February. While the fatality rate from COVID-19 has so far been lower than those of earlier outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and the H5N1 and H7N9 strains of bird flu, COVID-19 has also killed more people than all of those other viruses combined in a much shorter timeframe.
So, what can your business start doing today to keep your operation humming in the event that things get worse before they get better?
Businesses, especially IT groups and managed service providers, should be prepared to address the looming technical and security challenges that await if events take a negative turn, says Phil Ouellette, director of marketing at Applied Tech in Madison.
“Companies need strategies, operational plans, and organizational structures to deal with the potential long-term consequences,” Ouellette explains. “As Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar noted in a recent presidential briefing, businesses should be prepared for the eventuality of the coronavirus spreading as it has in other countries like China, South Korea, and Italy. CDC Deputy Director Anne Schuchat suggested companies should ‘dust off’ their business continuation plans for any disruptions that may result if the contagion spreads widely in the U.S.”
Governmental initiatives and recommendations will be primarily geared toward reducing the amount of human-to-human contact in addition to heightened awareness of our own personal hygiene habits, notes Ouellette.
So, what are some implications of less human to human contact?
- More remote working;
- Less travel and more virtual meetings and events;
- Disruption of critical vendor products and services; and
- Bad actors playing on employee fears and anxieties about the coronavirus.
“Companies, especially their IT groups and managed service providers, need to start contingency planning now to address these technology and security concerns,” Ouellette cautions. “Adopting sensible work-from-home policies — ‘do the right thing’ — to minimize human contact will be an approach many companies adopt, especially for their professional and office staff.”
Ouellette offers the following questions to better understand your business’ level of preparedness:
- Does your business have sufficient internet bandwidth to handle the higher volume traffic for a large increase in remote workers?
- Do you have a cloud-based unified communications system, such as Microsoft Teams, to facilitate more remote work?
- Do you have security protocols and systems, like multifactor authentication and VPN, to protect remote worker connections?
- Have you determined how you will manage and secure company data on employee personal devices (BYOD) as they become a common tool of choice in a remote environment?
- Does your IT help desk have proper procedures in place to adequately scale for the increase in remote workers and their issues such as renewing their credentials and connecting to the corporate VPN?
- How will your internal IT staff or managed service provider maintain your system infrastructure if they are required to work remotely?
- Can you maintain your necessary “uptime” to minimize any disruption to normal business operations?
- Do your managed services provider and other key vendor partners have a contingency plan or current operational capability to effectively service your business if they need to work remotely from their offices?
- Do your hardware providers have sufficient inventory and ability to ship any necessary equipment on a timely basis since they may be sourcing from Asia where the disruption to supply chains may be greater?
- Have you automated repetitive tasks that do not require an employee to carry out?
- Do you have a plan to increase your security screening, anticipating scammers and hackers will try to take advantage of employee anxieties and create cybersecurity risks for the company?
“The current threat posed by the coronavirus may not reach a level that severely impacts the U.S. economy and businesses,” says Ouellette. “Let’s hope that’s the case. The reality, however, is we continue to become a more globally connected community both in commerce and our personal travel. This is a positive trend that can benefit us all.
“Yet, the threat of future diseases that can threaten to upset our societies and businesses will persist, precisely because we continue to deepen our global connections. One only need to look back over the past several decades to recall other outbreaks that represented global threats at the time, such as SARS, H1N1, MERS, and Ebola.”
Businesses looking for more detailed information on how to best respond to the threat of COVID-19 can find a laundry list of recommendations and best practices from the CDC’s Interim Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which contains strategies employers can enact now, planning considerations for the future, and much more.
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