Companies Prepare for Pandemic
Marilyn Chase in The Wall Street Journal reports that large multinational companies are starting to make contingency plans should we experience a bird flu pandemic.
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Preparations took on a heightened urgency as China reported yesterday that a widespread H5N1 virus outbreak in birds in that country has infected humans there for the first time. Of two confirmed cases, a poultry worker died and a 9-year-old boy fell ill in central Hunan province but recovered. The boy’s 12-year-old sister, who died, is considered a suspected case.
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Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., is set to roll out its bird flu plan next month. A crucial element to the plan: Microsoft is widening access to its virtual private network — the electronic system of online access from home — to allow its 30,000 workers in Redmond and 7,000 in Asia to telecommute en masse. “We have to have the maximum number of employees telecommute [if] quarantined,” says Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s vice president of human resources.
“If the government tells us to stay home, we’ll stay home,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at a news conference in New York this month when asked about his personal plans in the event of a bird-flu outbreak. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The company also will provide preventive education for its 63,000 workers world-wide, and distribute hand sanitizers as a preventive measure.
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News of China’s human bird-flu cases “obviously increased concern,” at Cisco Systems Inc., but prompted no change in its plans, spokesman Ron Piovesan says. “We remain very vigilant.” Network equipment made at Cisco’s San Jose, Calif., headquarters can be assembled and tested by its plants world-wide if the Asian plants are shuttered. “If one area were to go down, we have plans to go elsewhere,” says Chris Kite, Cisco’s senior director of global risk management.
Cisco has asked 8,000 of its workers based in parts of Asia and Eastern Europe with bird-flu outbreaks to update their passports in case of mass evacuation. In a pandemic, Cisco would require employees traveling to an area where bird flu has been reported to get permission from a company vice president — much as it did during SARS.
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Airlines were among the sectors hardest-hit by travel restrictions during SARS. Now working to assuage premature pandemic anxiety, carriers are wary of sparking “fear that results in people changing travel plans,” says Katherine Andrus, assistant general counsel of the Air Transport Association, a trade group. “We’re hoping people will not overreact.”
Nevertheless, Richard Branson, chairman of airline Virgin Atlantic Airways recently said he bought 10,000 courses of Tamiflu for his employees. UAL Corp.’s United Airlines now keeps protective masks on flights as “standard operating procedure,” says spokeswoman Robin Urbanski.
United passengers with symptoms of suspected bird-flu or other influenza would be isolated and given a mask, a separate bathroom and biohazard bags for waste. Flight crews have long been instructed to call doctors on the ground and arrange to be met by an ambulance and public-health officers in cases of serious infectious disease. “We realized we needed to be prepared for any flu situation,” Ms. Urbanski says.