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'Pandemic Fatigue' Sets In (Or Maybe You've Noticed)

The avian flu has a plot line similar to a Stephen King novel. It’s a menacing presence, mysterious and somewhat hidden, striking in out-of-way places and threatening broader havoc -- a global evil. And until this year, it was a best-seller in newsrooms, spurring headlines that raised public attention and spurred organizations to plan for it.

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld

November 29, 2007 — CSO — The avian flu has a plot line similar to a Stephen King novel. It’s a menacing presence, mysterious and somewhat hidden, striking in out-of-way places and threatening broader havoc -- a global evil. And until this year, it was a best-seller in newsrooms, spurring headlines that raised public attention and spurred organizations to plan for it.

But media interest in the threat of a pandemic has fallen off. In a report this summer about pandemic planning, the White House said that attention to the pandemic has "waned in the media," while "the threat of avian influenza and the potential for an influenza pandemic has not."

The U.S. Government Accountability Office followed up in a report last month, and said the challenge for many organizations is "maintaining a focus on pandemic planning due to the uncertainty of when a pandemic may occur" and the need to address more immediate issues.

"There’s been a bit of what we call pandemic fatigue," says Myles Druckman, vice president of medical assistance of International SOS, a health and safety consulting service with some 4,500 employees worldwide. "When it fell out of the media, it also fell out of a lot of clients’ priority lists ... because now they weren’t being pushed, not only by the media but by their employees," he says.

In interviews of attendees at Gartner Inc.’s data center conference this week in Las Vegas, IT managers said they were nonetheless continuing to prepare for the potential.

Bob Kallas, director of computer support services at a company he didn’t want named, says his firm conducted a test a few months ago to see how many workers it could support remotely. The company picked a day and then told several hundred employees to work from home. "We want to measure readiness to be able to support the company," he says.

Richard Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., says pandemic planning continues at his university, with bimonthly meetings held specifically to address the issue. From an IT perspective, he says, the major planning issue remains continuing operations if the university is forced to close, which mostly means ensuring there’s enough remote access capacity on various systems.

But Siedzik says IT is only a small part of the overall planning challenge. For instance, the university has to prepare for the possibility that some students won’t be able to return home because of quarantines in their comm