Mid-March 2020, Spring Break, COVID-19 is being discussed in the news and we are about to go to Florida for a long weekend.
Should we go?
It’s just a long weekend, and they won’t close everything down, right?
Wrong.
While in Florida, all the parks closed one by one during our last couple of days in Florida. We came home from Florida with a few days left of spring break. From then on, the kids didn’t return to the school building and finished the school year remotely.
The early days
I remember those early days of planning for H1N1 back in 2009. This was when I was first introduced to Dr. Michael Osterholm. Dr. Osterholm is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CIDRAP, at the University of Minnesota.
Similar to our research and preparation for H1N1, for COVID-19, we looked at information about the Spanish Flu of 1918. We had been planning for staff shortages, but we never really planned for not having any of our staff in the office. All the H1N1 pandemic business continuity planning was focused on minimal staff within the office, and now nobody is allowed in the office.
In planning for H1N1, we learned that vaccines can take 10 to 15 years to develop and get approval, and in a pandemic, we don’t have that kind of time to get a vaccine out to the public. We also learned that since the 1940s, influenza vaccines have been made by utilizing chicken eggs. Global capacity for pandemic influenza vaccine production is less than 3 billion doses per year, far short of the 7 billion doses needed for universal coverage. Several pharmaceutical companies started looking at ways to remove the egg from the process to address these concerns.
For decades, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has provided funding and support to companies researching a vaccine process called mRNA. That research and collaboration allowed NIH and Moderna to start the first human trial of a COVID-19 vaccine on March 16, 2020, 63 days after selecting its genetic sequence.
Luckily, technology has come a long way in 10 years, and most large companies have been expanding their Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). What started as a nice to have for employees with sick kids to continue working while at home became necessary for most employees in the second quarter of 2020. It was great that we could all get into the corporate network, but our home networks were not as robust as the office environment.
For years, continuity planners talked about the last mile problem. Your home network is great on a one-off work-from-home day, but when all your neighbors are also working from home, plus all the neighborhood kids are doing school from home, the last mile problem is front and center.
Where we are four years later
In a February 2024 podcast, Dr. Osterholm provided some eye-opening data about COVID deaths:
“During the week of January 20th, which is the most recent week with complete death data, we still lost more than 2000 Americans. And last week, even based on the data from January, COVID was the seventh leading killer in the United States. This marks 24 straight weeks with weekly deaths above 1000 and 4 straight weeks, in which weekly deaths exceeded 2000.”
On March 1, 2024, the CDC dropped its five-day isolation recommendation for COVID and folded COVID into one set of guidance for common respiratory viruses. This does not mean that COVID has been eliminated, but it does align with how most individuals treat this virus. We are moving into a phase where COVID is like any other virus we deal with seasonally. Yearly vaccines to help fight the current COVID mutation will be given along with our yearly flu shot.
Companies have found that people don’t want to return to the office. Those who are in the office find it pointless because they are still in virtual meetings. Several companies have moved to having staff in the office two to three days a week. (Our team has a view on return-to-office mandates, too.)
From a business continuity perspective, the process must still be completed regardless of location. As we have seen leading up to 2020, the reliability of corporate technology is the main focus of recovery. Continuity Planners are working to communicate business needs to the technology team. They are bringing their concerns to leadership, hoping that companies will invest in technology availability, reliability, and capacity.
We’ve looked back on the pandemic on the podcast, too: how our early predictions held up in Episode 195: The New Normal Three Years Later, and what remote work changed for continuity in Episode 262: Evolving Business Continuity for Remote Work.
Conclusion
As we enter the 5th year of dealing with COVID, COVID will continue to circulate amongst the population, requiring business continuity planners to have work from home as a key strategy. As companies start bringing workers back to the office more regularly, we will need to continue to work with our technology partners to ensure remote capability remains a priority to upgrade and ensure capacity.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
- Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity.
- Get help running it. Business Continuity as a Service runs your plans, BIA, and exercises with you, wherever your people work.
- Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
- Talk to us. Set up a call to check whether your plans still assume everyone is in the office.
