Hi, I'm Tom Field senior vice president of editorial with information security media group I'm talking today about the emergence of coronavirus and what business continuity and disaster recovery executives need to know about this outbreak I'm speaking today with Regina Phelps. She's the founder of emergency management and safety solutions Regina. Thank you so much for joining me today So Regina as we sit here this morning as I look at the news I see that we're attributing 560 deaths now to coronavirus 28,000 infections 25 different countries and we're being accused by some in China of a Panic over reaction. So tell me what do we know today about the coronavirus outbreak?
That's a really great question, and it's complicated But let me just give you some sort of good news and bad news the good news is actually that the disease even though we do have 20 over 28,000 cases and over five hundred and sixty five deaths now The good news is is that the fatality rate remains relatively low It's around 2% and just to give you a sense of a difference SARS for example had a fatality rate of between nine and ten percent and MERS Which is the Middle East respiratory syndrome has a fatality rate of around 34% So the good news is it could be a lot worse The bad news is this is highly infectious and many epidemiologists now are actually saying it's about as infectious as the flu And so that means it's spreading rapidly So you're seeing a large number of cases the other little tiny piece of good news is in the last 24 hours The straight diagonal line of case growth has actually peered out just a tiny tiny bit It was literally a straight vertical line going from January 19th to yesterday And yesterday it sort of slowed a tiny bit So perhaps the quarantines that have been happening in China have been effective And I guess the other thing I would say to your listeners is that 99% of all the cases are in mainline China So yes, there are cases of 45 cases in Japan and 28 cases in Singapore And there are again as you mentioned over 25 nations with actually reported cases But the good news is on that perspective is it is not spreading rapidly outside of China Regina for business continuity and disaster recovery leaders outside of China What specifically do they need to be concerned about? We've been counseling our clients for the last three weeks So they need to be very proactive about their actions and what they're doing And there's a couple of things I would just say right off the top If your listeners have not activated an assessment team Which is part of their crisis management team to make an overall assessment of the company They need to do that now and they need to really look at how this could impact the company both in the short term But frankly also in the long term so that's the first thing the second thing is I do hope that they are really taken seriously the travel Bands to China as well as really considering all the other adjoining countries and the region as to whether that type of travel is important and required at this particular time Because you don't want to be in a situation where you're in an airport and you really don't know who you're sitting around When you're sitting by when you're on a plane, you don't know who's been to China or near China You don't know who they've had contact with so your opportunity for infection grows kind of exponentially when you're in those type of travel environment And then the third thing we would really have been asking all of our clients seriously to do is to really look at his Opportunity to both do employee education, which by the way, we're still in the flu season So it's good to be doing that anyway But things about good hand washing techniques cough hygiene making sure that if you're sick that you don't come to work those kinds of things How does this crisis compare so far to the impacts that we saw SARS in 2003 even H1N1N1 in 2009? So SARS was actually a disease that was present in the environment for about two years came out of China But it took you know over two years for them to assemble 8,000 cases of SARS So it started rapidly and it disappeared pretty quickly and then there were random cases for a while But it was over two years before they reached 8,000 cases MERS has been going on since 2012 and again It's another coronavirus and it's actually again connected to bats through the camel exposure at that point and it's been very slow moving If you will so since 2012 we only have 25 cases but a 34% fatality, so very different behaviors The pandemic we had in 2009 the H1N1 was very mild and it was a pandemic indeed But it did not kill many people Globally in fact it a lot it was like a really bad flu season, but it wasn't terribly unusual I think what happened with the 2009 pandemic is that it made everybody go back and re look at their infectious disease plans or pandemic plans And we certainly as people have been writing pandemic plans this year 2000 really went back and restructured our entire view of how you write a pandemic plan And now we really frame them into looking at infectious diseases and pandemics because frankly from Your chances of having a case of measles or whooping cough or some other common illness in your business is actually pretty good Because people are not necessarily vaccinating their children so we're seeing much more common illnesses than we ever had before reaching a business environment Regina if coronavirus were to rise to the level of a pandemic what then would that trigger? So the thing I would just say is this is that when if we do reach a pandemic it could be very much like it was in 2009 There were more people being sick there were some impacts to business But for the most part it wasn't severe if we continue on a 2% fatality rate Or drops even lower I think what we would see is that we would not see a major impact in business There would be more illnesses and there might be some restrictions and travel and so on But for the most part I think it would be relatively mild if however That fatality rate increases then I think you can see a lot of widespread impact The other thing that could happen time is if all of a sudden it comes into an area and everyone is sick And you might really have an impact where it's suddenly dropped into a community where you would have difficulty in a business being able to function as it normally does Virginia brought up some issues I want to follow up with and get a little bit deeper and one is about travel What should organizations be doing internally now to address business travel in and out of affected regions?
Ideally the crisis management program that you have at your company and tied to an infectious disease and pandemic plan that hopefully have What they should be doing is that at this point there should be screening for all travel to top side That's outside the United States specifically in Asia and there should be a real question where managers would be asking the question Is this essential travel mission critical essential travel the reason for your visit can only be accomplished by a face-to-face meeting And what we're encouraging our clients to do is that for people that need to go to China or to the outline countries around them So like South Korea and Vietnam and Thailand and so on that they are really raising this up to a very senior Person in the organization to approve the travel so that we all understand that this is important and critical When that individual returns from that travel in that region It's also very wise that they actually quarantine at home for 14 days because the last thing you would want to do is have somebody go to Let's say Thailand or Vietnam and they do become exposed they come home, you know and 10 days later They become ill and they actually have been in the office and now they could have potentially infected many others inside the office So you'd want them to quarantine at home for 14 days Regina, what supply chain concerns do you have if this is to grow and affect businesses not just in China But but beyond the region you stop and think about it Just think about now all the products and you're just even in your personal life that actually come from China There are so many things that we use every day that have connections back to China So in your own personal life, but frankly in the business We have several major clients of ours that are already having severe supply chain disruptions And part of that is if you think about how businesses are organized now It's very much to adjust in time kind of delivery system So people don't have large amounts of supplies necessarily for products that they're in making for example in manufacturing and they're getting things constantly being shipped in So I have several large technology clients that are already suffering from major supply chain disruptions I also have had clients that have issues related to serious foreclosures like Starbucks and other major vendors Nike's already advertised that they're going to be having a financial impact and you'll see more and more of that as we go through in the next year So I think what's happening is that when you look at the supply chain impacts I would really ask all of your listeners to really talk to their purchasing departments and ask the question What do we buy? How critical is it? Where does it come from? And that by the way, it's not an easy answer many times because you may know what you buy But you may not really know where it really comes from you have to do often a lot of digging to find that out But that's a really critical issue to think about Regina, how do you respond to the criticism coming out of China that what we're seeing globally is a panicked over reaction to coronavirus I saw that this morning in Bloomberg and I I chug a little bit and I kind of understand where they're coming from because you know The politics of the who the world health organization is really a tough line that they walk So for example, when you issue a public emergency Notification about a disease in the country Of course, the country is really upset because they know that that's going to impact them from a perspective of commerce and revenues and so on But at the same time We have to look at the overall global health and say that that's what needs to happen And I think I think China's a lot of kind of blustering I understand where they're coming from because my gosh the world has pretty much cut them off There's very few airliners that are actually flying into China Many many many countries have refused to take citizens from China into the into their country And so there are these blockades that are being erected And when you look at the spread of the disease, it would be hard for you as a country to say I I'm just going to go ahead and let these individuals into my nation I think it would be in many cases irresponsible So I understand the angst and the frustration that China feels but I also understand from a public health situation That we need to be conscious and we need to be diligent if we can actually be effective And stopping the virus at least we'll be able to slow it down Like tied to that time the recent studies and epidemiological surveys are now looking at this is very likely To become a pandemic the way it's spread It's infectious rate And so we may not be at that point now But in the next month or two we could be given the magic of social media There's lots of news lots of information lots of misinformation and interpretations about coronavirus What is your immediate advice to business continuity disaster recovery leaders about what they should be doing now?
So first of all, and I want to really um build off your comment about media When you're doing a gathering of situational awareness and situational awareness is simply defined as what's going on right now Is that you need to be highly sensitive to the information that you're receiving And what you need to do is that you need to really look carefully at all information that you're thinking of producing and sending forward So my general rule in our client population is that we want to always always have at least two sources or three to validate any information I don't pull anything off of social media without doing triple validation. There are so many crazy Theories right now about the coronavirus anything from the CIA releasing the virus into the United States Two things such as rats from level four labs and a Wuhan being released causing this particular outbreak and a zillion others So you need to really be careful in your situational awareness for what business continuity and individual should be doing at their company What I would really say is I've got kind of 10 things that are on my shopping list for people to be doing right now First of all, they they should be working their impetuses and pandemic plan So hopefully they've got that in their hot hands or revising it and modifying in real time If they don't have one they need one the second thing is that they really need to be developing regular and very likely daily Situation status reports for the crisis management team and executive team so that there's a uniform piece of information that everybody is using To make decisions about and if you're looking for a sample or an idea what a good sit stat report looks like I would direct your attention to the who website They actually done a lot of work to turn their current sit stat report into really a fine document And it's a great template to consider when you're actually looking at what you would do yourself The third thing is you got to be looking at your supply chains and many companies are acutely doing that already and many might be sitting back thinking Well, you know, it's not gonna really impact us at all. I would not be so sure try and find a mask anywhere in the United States right now Trying to find gloves just basic things are almost impossible to find and that could happen to you as well in other parts of your company The fourth thing I would say use I would really encourage you to be communicating with your key stakeholders about what your plans are and what's going on with you You certainly want to be communicating with your employees But also you should be ready from an investor relations perspective to your key customers to talk about what your status is and what's going on Many my clients are being approached as a third-party vendor for example to understand what's going on with their response Or what kind of impact are they having? So that should be something that should be standard talking points that everybody should be using to talk about the same thing going on So you don't have this communication so the communication your stakeholders are super important The thing I would say is that you should really be educating your employees on what I would call smart health habits And hopefully you're doing it anyway because it is flu season So good hand-watching caught hygiene and really telling people to stay home when they're set Number six would be marketing importance of your company emergency notification system.
Hopefully you have an emergency notification system But that is only as effective as the information that's in it So an emergency notification system as you know can be used to send out emergency messages to your employees with a flick of a switch and Contact everybody simultaneously, but of course It's only as good as the contact information that you have and if it's not reliable or accurate then it's problem So you want to make sure that that's really refreshed on my list I would say number seven is you should be pulling out your BIAs and your business economy plans So your business impact analysis and your business economy plans And I would look through everything through the lens of an infectious disease One of the potential impacts and many times business company plans are really not written For something like a large number of people not being able to come to work or not able to work Number eight on my list is I would really encourage you to reach out to all your critical third-party vendors Is super common now around the world that everybody is very reliant on other companies to provide services for them And what's going on with them and what kind of plans do they have in place and what's going on with their perspective of this disease outbreak If your third-party vendor is critically impacted that could be a huge issue for you And so do not be flat-footed I'd be reaching out to all of them right now. Number nine you should enjoy your Do an inventory of your personal protective equipment mask gloves hand sanitizers for space supplies really hard to get masks Really hard to get gloves right now in the US and there's a reason for that Not only are people panicked and everybody buying them, but yes, where they all come from Yes, China. I think 90% of all the masks made are made in China now And the last thing I would really encourage all of your information security professionals to really increase your screening There are a ton of new scanning and new hacker efforts now using the virus actually as a way to build off people's anxieties There's fake websites There's pushing emails about more information on the coronavirus There's all kinds of hoaxes And I've had some of my see so buddies say to me that that's become a problem because people are building off the anxieties that we all have And so again, you know hackers and scammers Look in the news and they're just smart like anybody else and they should um and they try to take an opportunity and work it So those are 10 things I would recommend all your folks to do right now. Excellent Virginia perfect points.
I appreciate your time I appreciate your insight look forward to talking to you again soon Again, we've been talking about coronavirus that has been speaking with Regina Phelps the founder of emergency management and safety solutions For information security media group. I'm tom field. Thank you very much