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Preparing for a Pandemic
By Mitchell Beer | September 1, 2009
At our regular staff meeting last week, we introduced a standing agenda item that will be a part of our working lives for the foreseeable future.
Our COO, Woody Huizenga, unveiled an advanced draft of our pandemic preparedness plan, and summarized the best available information on what we can expect during this year’s flu season: On a scale of one to 10, the severity of the H1N1 pandemic will be somewhere between one and 10.
I’m pleased and relieved that we’re getting ready for the pandemic, despite all the factors that should make it tough for a firm our size to prepare. I’m proud that we’re striking a careful, deliberate balance between needless panic and dangerous over-confidence.
And I desperately hope that everyone who’s a part of our company’s extended family—our staff, our associates, and their loved ones—come through the next few months healthy and whole.
What we absolutely refuse to do is bury our heads in the sand, counting on the worst of the pandemic to pass us by while we’re not looking. It worries me when I hear voices in our industry insisting that we ignore the science, blame the media for sensationalizing the pandemic or, worst of all, pass off the social distancing that is essential to pandemic safety as governments’ latest attack on meetings.
The same voices came through loud and clear in 2003, when Toronto faced an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). At the height of the epidemic, we attended the MPI Ottawa Chapter’s annual awards gala, with a long-standing client from the public health community as our guest.
Over dinner, we learned that medical officers of health were considering whether to curtail public gatherings in affected communities until SARS had passed. Not an hour later, as I circulated through the room, I heard a veteran hotelier bemoan the needless, terribly unfair impact the epidemic was already having on the meeting business in Toronto. And the reaction was visceral when a group of several thousand cancer practitioners decided to move their annual meeting to a different city.
Our industry was up in arms, but to this day, I can’t buy in to the fuss: against our legitimate concern about jobs and economic impact, the cancer practitioners were thinking about many thousands of patients with compromised immune systems. Even if the risk of infection was vanishingly small—if we didn’t understand why the meeting had to be relocated, how could we expect to be taken seriously as a mature profession or industry?
If SARS was the dress rehearsal, H1N1 is prime time. According to a presidential panel report released last week, the United States alone can expect a global pandemic to infect 30-50% of the population, hospitalize up to 1.8 million people, and kill 30,000 to 90,000. In Canada so far, we’ve seen just over 7,000 cases, 70 dead, and 1,422 people hospitalized, including 275 in intensive care, with some of the worst outbreaks hammering home everything we’ve ever known about the social determinants of health.
That’s why my column in this week’s MeetingsNet Extra is the first of a two-part series on pandemic flu. This week, the floor goes to Nelson Fabian, executive director of the Denver-based National Environmental Health Association (NEHA), advising that individual preparedness is the cornerstone of the broader community response to a severe outbreak. Next week, I’ll be featuring veteran independent planner MaryAnne Bobrow, with a perspective on what the industry can do to prepare.
Meanwhile, The Conference Publishers is getting ready for the pandemic before it hits.
We’ve begun routine monitoring of flu advisory sites and introduced weekly staff updates.
In the next week, we will install a hand wash station at our front door and acquire masks, gloves, and disinfectant for anyone who gets sick while they’re at work.
By mid- to late September, we will complete a long-awaited server upgrade that has now been extended to allow everyone in the office to work from home if necessary.
Most important, in an office where employees have always been urged to stay home and take care of themselves if they’re unwell, we’ve undergone a slight shift in emphasis and a major change in tone. Everyone understands that going home at the first sign of flu symptoms is a matter of protecting colleagues’ health as well as their own. And the collegial encouragement to err on the side of health and safety has become a firm set of instructions.
To the meeting professionals who object so loudly to any kind of pandemic preparedness, much less the social distancing that might be necessary at the height of an outbreak, this will all seem like a horrible over-reaction. The point is that we aren’t changing our procedures today—we’re just ready for a far wider range of contingencies. As I talked to Nelson Fabian last week, I suddenly realized that a relatively simple pandemic plan had given us a rather macabre competitive advantage over any editorial firm that has failed to take similar steps.
“No one’s trying to scare anyone,” he said. “The bottom line is to be cautious, stay informed, be prudent, continue with personal preparedness, and incorporate these threats in our business planning.” If the worst comes to pass, the companies with the most robust pandemic plans will be in the best position to bounce back, but the opposite is also true: “If I don’t take this kind of issue into account, the organizations that have will gain a competitive advantage over me.”
Topics: Business Issues, Economic Impact, Emergency Preparedness, The Conference Publishers |