Hi, I'm Tom Field, senior vice president of editorial with information security media group. My topic is living and working in the COVID-19 pandemic, and I welcome back to the studio and my guest Regina Phelps. She's a pandemic expert and she's founder of emergency management and safety solutions. Regina, it is a pleasure to talk with you again, but I'm sorry we have to have this ongoing discussion about the pandemic.
Indeed, Tom, we've become frequent visitors and unfortunately I think this is going to go on for a while. Since the last time we spoke about two weeks ago, COVID-19 or the coronavirus has popularly known has been declared a pandemic. So my question, I don't mean for this to be flipped, but it's a pandemic. Now what?
Yeah, this is where we have to really double down. And I think many people might recall the 2009 pandemic, which fortunately turned out to be a very mild event. This is not going to be that way. And so I think people need to really put on their new lens of a serious pandemic with significant global complications.
Regina, as we sit here today and these numbers could have changed in the last 30 minutes, but we're looking at about 220,000 reported infections worldwide, 9,000 deaths overnight in the US. We've added almost 2,500 new infections. Do the numbers say to you on a daily basis? You know, that's really interesting and I think certainly in the US what you're going to see is that these numbers are going to go up exponentially because now we're actually testing.
And so I would tell all of your listeners if they're US-based, they should not panic when they first see this major escalation of cases in the US. The disease is out there. And so what it tells me is that we are faced with a highly infectious disease. We have a lot of asymptomatic individuals who are shedding the virus daily.
This really tells us what is going to make a difference for us is severe social distancing, which I know you all become experts in in the last few weeks. But I'm really not kidding. You should be staying home. You should not be going out.
And you should be keeping six feet of distance between you and every person you come into contact with. Regina, when we last we spoke, we talked about supply chain and it was mainly a China issue with that point. What was being manufactured in China? Coronavirus now is something that every continent except Antarctica is facing.
How is this impacting the supply chain woes that already were deep? This is really an issue and it's really there's kind of two ways to discuss this. First of all is the fear-based issue. And so of course we've all seen lines at grocery stores and Costco's in every possible place that you could buy things such as hand sanitizer, toilet paper, canned beans.
And people are first of all fear-based in their purchases. So that is really significantly impacting the supply chain of everyday commodities that people all over the world consume. And so that's the first aspect of the supply chain is that we're having significant issues on common products. And of course that's difficult for people to restock shell adequately putting tremendous pressure on manufacturers and also the distribution systems.
And then there's also all those other products, electronics and everything else that we're still going to continue to need. That's also a problem, not just because of China, but also around the world. We're having supply chain disruptions because of transportation issues, insufficient numbers of drivers, manufacturing facilities that are being shut down, or being curtailed because of less people coming to work. So I think this is going to continue to be an issue worldwide and will only deepen as this goes forward.
Virginia, you have the opportunity to work with lots of health care professionals, businesses, government agencies. What are the best, most effective responses that you've seen so far? That's a really great question. And what I would say to you is the things that I've seen that are most effective, first of all, is that individuals or companies have activated, not only their business continuity plans, but they've activated and stood up their crisis management process.
This is a really important thing to do right now if you have not started. And I would also say to you, if you've begun, you should also rethink how you're doing this. What I want and why I mean by this is that we should have a lot of structure around how we're actually connecting with each other, what we're reporting and how we're managing this crisis. And let me just give you a couple of ideas to think about what I'm looking for in the best managed companies right now in the area of managing the pandemic, is that their crisis management team has been activated.
They're, of course, virtual, but what they're doing is they're doing two really critical things every time they meet. They're talking about the overall status and it's well organized in the comments and how they're reporting out. And secondarily, they have something that's called an incident action plan. And what's that?
An incident action plan is where you actually have a document and a process where you're having clear objectives. So everybody that's on the crisis management team has a series of objectives that they're reporting out the status of those on. And they're constantly moving towards literally being able to manage this holistically. If you don't have a process when you come together, then what it is is kind of free for all.
And to manage this effectively and be able to really tick off all these items, you need really crisp management, clear reporting, clear objectives, and then managing performance on that. And so my most effective clients are setting an operational period where they're meeting at the beginning of the day, if there's an urgent issue in the middle of the day, and certainly at the end, they're reporting their status very crisply, they're reporting on their objectives and at the end of those conversations, they're asking themselves the question, okay, what do we need to do next? And so they're very scripted and very structured and that makes them super efficient and it also brings down the stress level of all those individuals who are managing this crisis. So globally, we've got more people working remotely than we ever have in the history of the world.
We've got more families home now adding to the complications and the stress and the responsibilities. What vulnerabilities do you fear might get overlooked as we're trying to adjust to what I refer to as the new normal? You know, from an information security perspective, oh my gosh, as you well know that the scammers and the bad guys, this is the best time of their life. They have got a huge number of people all over the world that are frightened and scared and death.
And therefore, they're much more effective in being able to get people to first of all click on things. I've seen some incredibly well-designed vision emails that you would swear are the real deal. You know, something from a Walgreens or a CDS, we just got a new shipment of masks, click here. And you know, people are afraid and so they don't necessarily think as clearly as they normally would.
So I think that the awareness of information security needs to be front and paramount in people's minds and I think there needs to be continually ongoing education but also companies need to really look at the exposure they have as people are working from home. There's a lot more people that might have access to company computers than ever before. Now that they would do bad things or they might go to, if your kid all of a sudden is using your laptop or something, maybe their schoolwork, they might be going to websites that would not be appropriate or could have malware on them. So I've heard some of my clients who have reported things like that.
You also folks who are using their home systems and maybe their routers aren't as good as they could be. Maybe their home passwords aren't as good as they could be. And so there really needs to be a stiffening up, if you will, of information security processes in the home that maybe aren't as good as they could be. And so I think we're going to see a lot more potential cyber events, more breaches, more malware, more ransomware, because people are again not thinking as clearly as they possibly could.
Regina, last time we spoke, we talked about preparing for the long haul and apparently this is Act 1 scene 1. How should businesses and people be approaching the coming weeks as we continue to practice social distancing as we start to shelter in place and as, you know, what's sort of anomaly this week does become the new norm. The first thing is that what you need is information. And so let me just talk about that for a second.
What I would hope is that every company, if you have more than one location in particular, is that you want to make sure that you have a really clear picture of what's happening in your world. You need to be able to produce every single day a situational status report. And let me give you an idea of what I'm looking for. Whether you have one location or you have many, what you need to know is every place you are open, every place you have a shingle, even if everybody's working from home, you need to know these five things.
The first thing you need to understand is what's happening with our people. Who's sick, who's quarantined, and that you hadn't been to death. Now why that's important is that even if everybody in your company is working from home, you still need to know, overall, are they having any health symptoms related to COVID-19? Now I know that there might be concerns that people might have about HIPAA, what I just care about is the numbers.
If you're not monitoring this, all of a sudden you can think, I have everybody at home working, and maybe two or three or four or ten or twenty percent of your population is now sick and not able to perform. So you need to understand, first of all, what's happening with my people and every location you need to understand that. Secondarily, if you're still operational and you have facilities open, which many places are like shipping and receiving and manufacturing and so on, what's the status of the facility? So you want to give sort of a dashboard, if you will, is it green and operational, no problems, is it red, is severely impacted, and closed, or is it yellow, and maybe we've got some issues?
The third thing I want to know about is my technology. What's happening with all my folks, whether they're working in the office or in a manufacturing facility or they're working from home, do I have increased information security related issues? Am I having problems with people now working remotely, is our health desk sufficient and able to support them? And what about things like when they have equipment failures like a laptop that dies, are you going to get them one?
So understanding what's going on in the technology space is critical. The third thing is looking at your business processes. What's happening in my business operations? I mean, you clearly understand what's time sensitive, mission critical, and are you having any concerns and issues in what you do for a living?
And then lastly, I would want to know, every day, anything related to your reputation and brand? Are you in the news? Are you in the news about this? And kind of is it a good media reporting, either traditional or social, or are you having, is it neutral, or are people slamming you?
So every day, your crisis management team, your executive team should know those five things. People, facilities, technology, business processes, and reputation and brand. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I would hope that you would also have some clear process for reporting issues.
Many of my clients that are large, that have multiple locations, have set up literally a crisis reporting line. So that when people always send start to have illnesses in an area, or some immediate concerns, they can just immediately call a friend, so to speak, instead having to go to their manager and then that manager, especially when people are working remotely, it makes it really difficult to find people sometimes. And so the idea of being able to report problems rapidly, so they can be immediately called up is really important. The fourth thing on my list, and I think it's really critical, is the issue related to business continuity and business impact analysis.
Our plans in that space were not written for this. This is a true crisis emergency is defined by Harvard. And what I would say to you is that you pull out your business continuity plans, they were not written for this. So you need to look at those plans and ask yourself the question, what do I need to really be doing?
I mean, really be doing. When we write a BIA in a business continuity plan, we're assuming that many things are going to be operational, and this is going to be a short term event. This is going to go on for weeks, very likely months. So you need to look at those business continuity plans and your BIA really through the lens of a global pandemic with weeks and months of disruption.
And then last I would say to you, I would hope that you're all reaching out to your third party vendors, those companies that you are really dependent on. And what you really want to know is how are they doing, and are they going to be able to continue to support you? I've had many of my clients who are either third party vendors themselves or have been asking their third party vendors, how are they doing? Do they have a pandemic plan, et cetera?
And if you don't ask the right questions, everything you ask is going to be a yes. And so I would say to you, if you're heavily dependent on third party vendors, you need to ask the right questions to get answers that are going to be helpful to you, because otherwise, if you ask everything pretty much as a yes or no, and it's pretty broadly written, you're not going to learn anything. And if you're dependent on these people and all of a sudden they stop or can't perform what they normally do, your company is going to be even further impacted than it is today. So I would put those things on the top of your listeners list for today.
Regina, we're inundated with information, whether it's news or reports. What's the information that you most pay attention to on a daily basis now? That's a really great question. So my news sources are the following.
And again, this is really important in an area where there are lots of crazy ideas out there. So my data sources for health is I'm looking always to the John Hopkins sites for the numbers. I'm also looking to the CDC and the who I would encourage you to look at your local county department of public health and the state department of public health as well. Some of the states are doing a pretty good job.
Others, not as much. So that's for health data. Then I think you need to have a really good source of information for basic what's happening in the world. And again, because of changes in news agencies, you'll see that there's hardly in many communities or local papers anymore.
And so trying to try and do like what's happening is really difficult. But my best news sources are really at this point, the New York Times, the Washington Post. I would also say that the BBC, if you're looking internationally in the Guardian as well. And then I would say to you that for news related to business, I think the Bloomberg is doing a fabulous job as well as the Wall Street Journal, I read all of those every day.
And I try and do like the information. But all of those have a lot of reporters on the ground. They're obviously doing a lot of money behind this to make them actually really credible reporting. And you want to follow credible resources.
And the other thing I would say to you, Tom, is that it's really important that your listeners when they read something anywhere on the internet, that they need at least a look for two or three sources that are going to substantiate that. A good example occurred just yesterday when the French Prime Minister tweeted that you should not be taking ibuprofen because there were signs that it could cause severe problems with COVID-19. Okay, this is one tweet by a French Prime Minister, the Health Minister, actually, in France. That started off the most insane and crazy set of things I've ever seen in a long time.
All of a sudden, the world is saying that you can't take ibuprofen. And the Prime Minister or the Health Minister said it was because I was posted in the hoop. They've never said anything about ibuprofen. It took me a while to peel it back on the internet, but there is no documented health information at all or any research about ibuprofen and COVID-19.
So what does that say to you? You had better be careful what you read. You need to look at other sources before you spread out anything, whether it's to your family, your friends, or to your business. And you have to be smart.
You have to be smart and look around. So go to credible sources and don't take anything for granted without looking around and trying to validate it. Regina, as always, I appreciate your time and insight. You are a source of reason in unreasonable times.
Thank you so much, Thomas. Always great to be with you. I've been talking with Regina Phelps, the founder of Emergency Management and Safety Solutions for Information Security Media Group. I'm Tom Field.
Thank you very much.