Hi, this is Tom Field, Senior Vice President of Editorial with Information Security Media Group. I'm speaking again about coronavirus, and I'm speaking again with Regina Phelps, the founder of Emergency Management and Safety Solutions. Regina, thank you so much for speaking to me again so soon after our last conversation. Tom, it's always a delight.
And there's so much going on. We have a lot to talk about. Oh, it's a moving target. It's been two weeks since we last spoke.
By my account, infections have jumped to 90,000 worldwide, fatalities to more than 3,100, and the virus is reported now in 70 plus countries. Have I got the numbers right? Yeah, you're pretty close. What do they mean to you?
What do they say to you? Well, I think there's a couple of things I would say. First of all, this is a very successful virus. You know, there's some viruses that are not so successful in replicating and moving about.
So it's able to maintain sustained transmission. And one of the ways it's doing that, first of all, it's not terribly lethal. You know, Ebola kills 80% of the people that get it, so, you know, the disease doesn't get very far because people die off too quickly. It kills off the host.
So this spreads easily. A lot of people that are actually infectious are asymptomatic, so that means that it's able to spread much more quickly in a community. And so it tells me that we are in for a long time. And I think what we'll see over time is that this will spread everywhere throughout the world, primarily for really one big reason.
It's a brand new disease, a virus that has never existed before. And that means every single one of us is susceptible. And that means every one of us have a really good chance of catching it sometime during this next 12 months. Regina, how close are we to this being considered a pandemic?
And I guess my follow-up would be, why does that matter? That's a really good question. So the WHO, again, has declined to declare a pandemic. I think that was actually today at some point.
And I guess I have two things I really say about that. First of all, the classic definition of a pandemic is an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographical area and affects a large proportion of the population, which means that we have sustained transmission. Now, if the WHO declares a pandemic, what does that mean? Well, the WHO doesn't have any authority to actually mandate what happens.
That actually tells governments that if they haven't started to do something, they need to get on it. And secondarily, that may push many governments to restrict more activities, perhaps. But in a big scheme of things, does it mean a lot if the WHO declares a pandemic? And the answer is no.
Given everything we've seen in the past couple of weeks, what are the trends that matter the most to you? That's a great question. I think, for me, I'm really thinking about the sustained transmission. So, for example, the place in the United States that's the hotspot, of course, is Washington.
They have an increasing number of cases. We've had more deaths up there today. We have large numbers of emergency responders that are now in self-quarantine. And so I think what I'm concerned about is not only the increasing illness, and there will be increasing fatalities.
We just have to be prepared for that. But I think what you saw in Washington is a trend that I think you're going to continue to see. And that is where individuals, like emergency responders, firefighters, police officers, become exposed, and then they quarantine them, which, of course, is appropriate. But I want you to think about that.
If that happened in large numbers of cities across the United States, we had a lot of people now in self-quarantine. And begin to think about the impact that means to public service, security, firefighting, emergency response. So I'm concerned that what I saw in Washington, which was an appropriate action, yes, but if that happens in a lot of places throughout the U.S., I think we're going to have a real impact that people are going to feel and see in their daily lives. To this point, we've seen supply chain disruption, which you and I spoke about last time we talked.
We've seen the global market react just this past week. What other economic impact should we be watching or watching for? Well, I think what we're going to start seeing is this impact of, as the disease begins to spread across the United States. So you're seeing the global impact in a tremendous amount with the stock market and the impact in commodities and the supply chains, as you mentioned.
But I think what you're going to start seeing in the United States is that, you know, think about a disease, Tom, is it scares people. It's a invisible threat. It's not something tangible, like a wildfire or something that you can see. You can't get your arms around it.
You don't really know where it is. And so that fear will begin to really change people's behavior. So even though there may not be requirements for restrictions of public gatherings or going to restaurants or going to theaters or things like that, people might really begin to change their behavior in order to protect themselves for this foe that they cannot see, protect their families. And so just think about it for a moment.
How many days that you might go to a Starbucks or you might go to a local sandwich shop and maybe you're thinking about your own personal safety and you stop doing many of those things. And then begin to think about what that means. The economic impact of small little businesses or corner stores or places like that that you go to on a regular basis and you spend, you know, five or 10 bucks or whatever it is. But you're employing through that expenditure those people that work in those small locations and then begin to think about that happening, not just you, but other people across cities, across states, across the country.
And I think what we're going to start to see is that economic impact is going to really be at the grassroots level. And that could impact, gosh, just think about that. Health insurance because people won't be able to afford it or maybe they can't afford to get tested or they don't have ability to pay for medications and they can't pay their rent and so on. So I think there's a real possibility for a significant impact to America at the most local level as people begin to restrict their spending and they're going out and really changing how they live their lives for a period of time, which will really impact small businesses and local economies.
Regina, for many enterprises, the term business as usual means domestic and international travel, means attending conferences, community meetings. In what ways should we start revisiting this concept of business as usual? Well, I think what we really have to think about is, okay, this is a different environment. We are facing a foe that's all around us and we don't know if our current actions, if we live, continue to do as we've always done, if we're exposing people and therefore we may have a lot more cases and we certainly might have more sick employees and they may not be able to go to work and so on.
So I think what you're going to start seeing is that all of these activities such as meetings and going to conferences and so on are really going to change. There's going to be a huge push towards more people that can work from home. There's going to be a big push towards more teleconferences, more webinars, more things of which we are in a virtual environment. And certainly if you look at the stock market, one of the benefits of this whole experience have been those who provide virtual meetings, those who do those types of things that can connect us, like collaborative tools or go to meeting or WebEx or all those other products that actually are enabling us to continue our work, but we're doing it virtually.
And so I think the new business as usual will be migrating much more to a virtual environment. And I think what might be interesting is that at the end of this, I think people will not immediately go back to the way it was. So, for example, if you are able to successfully do a lot of business and you used to always get in a plane to do it, but for six or eight months or 10 months, you didn't do that, then, you know, why are you going back to do that? And so I think that may mean that people revisit how they actually do business as usual post-pandemic.
Regina, what if our colleagues find themselves in a community that's under a state of emergency, as happened last week in San Francisco during the RSA conference? My understanding is that there were some business leaders that had to leave just because of that, because of their corporate requirements. Is this common? Actually, no, that's not terribly common.
I think, and I'm actually from San Francisco, so I can speak a little bit as to why they declared that state of emergency. There's an odd part of many government entities that for them to actually do a different type of planning, for them to actually activate emergency operations centers and fully staff those and bring them up, and for them to cross work together in departments in a different way than they do as usual, it has to be under the state of emergency. So for San Francisco, for them to be able to create that state of emergency allowed them, you know, for the EOC to activate, for cross-pollinization across departments, and the access to additional funding. But I think you raise an interesting point that if you are any place and there is a state of emergency, all of a sudden you're not able to travel, I think you really need to think about that.
Now in the United States, even if we really have a serious clampdown, if you're on a business trip, let's say, you're still going to be able to probably find an easier way to get home. If At the federal level and at the state and county level, have been meeting with local school districts or state school districts, and they've been looking at how they would actually go about doing closures. And the thing about a closure is that if there are kids that start getting sick and they decide to close the school, they often will not just reopen it 14 days later. If there's a lot of sustained illness still in that population, they're going to keep the schools closed for potentially a protracted period of time, maybe even a month.
And so, yes, they'd have, you know, learning, probably distance learning and other kinds of things that they would be doing so students don't miss as much time. However, parents now have a huge obligation about what are they going to be able to do to go to work. And so the issue about, you know, how many people do you have that work for you that have children? What if they do have a school closure?
Who's going to be able to stay home and take care of those kids? And how is that going to impact your employee population? That's a huge issue that employers really need to grapple with right now. Regina, you shared with me a document that you're sharing with people on advice in a situation we're in.
And at the end of it, you advise be prepared for the long haul. What is the long haul? Boy, if I knew that, Tom, I'd be a billionaire. So let me give you an example.
We work for many global companies, and many of them have lots of offices in China and Asia. Many of my clients have been activated 24 by 7 for over six weeks. Now, at the beginning of every kind of activation like this, I give my standard lecture, which is you've got to pace yourself. This could go on for a long time.
And everybody always said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I will tell you what my clients look like. They've been doing this for six weeks. They're already burned out.
And what I beg my clients to do is, first of all, you've got to understand that you need somebody to replace you. You need to check out. You need somebody. So I look to say that anybody who's in this business of business continuity, crisis management, disaster recovery, they better have at least three deep that's going to replace you.
And you need to immediately, first of all, look about developing staffing charts so that you're actually saying, okay, I'm taking a 7 to 3 shift and you're doing 3 to 11 and the next person's doing the night shift of 11 to 7, and that we're actually keeping to that. Then you make sure that people do have decent times to take a break. And even things just as simple as, you know, making sure that people still can get some exercise, making sure that they have some decent nutrition, that's all really important because we're going, we have a long haul in front of us. This could go on, Tom, easily for 12 months, but it could be super intense for the next six.
And if we continue to think like this is going to be over in two or three days or a week, we're going to be burned out and there's going to be nobody to come in and relieve us. And so pacing yourself is really important. And think about this for months, not just weeks. Regina, we're overwhelmed every day with news reports.
You can log into CNN or whatever your source is and see updates literally by the minute. What are the important areas of news that we should be looking at on a daily basis to say, stay apprised of what's happening? That's a great question because it is really overwhelming. I think obviously paying attention to what's happening globally as far as the disease is concerned.
So, you know, going to the John Hopkins site, for example, or the Kaiser Family Foundation site has got a good mapping. So first of all, just looking at trending. And actually, by the way, I would recommend that the family, the Kaiser Family Foundation's got a really great website that talks about trends and they have a way of actually taking out all of the China cases and just looking at what's happening in the world. So you can actually see this incredible escalation of cases.
It's actually visually very helpful. So I think I would look at have some good, dependable places you can go for numbers and look at that from a perspective of trends. Then I think depending on your business, you need to really be following what's happening in your industry. From a supply chain perspective to up to you, but also what's happening in your industry in general.
And then also I think the other thing is having some good local news sources, which is increasingly hard to find, by the way, with local newspapers closing. But what is a source for information locally in the key offices that you care about? There are a lot of vendors that provide a variety of services that can deliver these pieces of information to you. But a lot of companies don't have them.
So for me, I think it's important to find some really good, reliable number source. You want to have some really good information that's what's happening in your industry. And then you want to be finding things that are going on local where you live, but also where your offices are, so you can understand what's happening in your community. You know, I keep wanting to say that this coronavirus crisis is just like X, but I can't find the X in memory.
There really isn't anything to compare this to, is there? Yeah, you know, I'll tell you, funny that you say that because in reality, you're absolutely right. So I've done pandemic planning for over 20 years. And of course, we've had a variety of significant scares and we did have the H1N1.
But I mean, that just turned out to be really, to be honest, a really severe flu season. And the biggest pandemic before that was in the 60s, which was the H3N2. Again, a lot of people got sick, but not a big deal. So in contemporary times, this is it.
I mean, we, you go back to the 1918 flu would probably be an example of that. I'm not saying this is going to be like that by any stretch. So, but, you know, something hugely impactful. This will touch every aspect of your life.
That's the big takeaway. This is going to touch every aspect of your life. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your insight and your candor.
And let's continue the conversation. Great, Tom. Always great to be with you. Again, we've been talking about the coronavirus update.
I've been speaking with Regina Phelps, founder of Emergency Management and Safety Solutions. For Information Security Media Group, I'm Tom Field. Thank you very much.