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Pandemic Flu Monitor: Small Businesses Employ Half of Private Sector… They Need a Pandemic Plan Now
This may be a first—-small business owners may need to beg employees to stay home so they do not infect others with the pandemic (H1N1) flu.
If you own a small business, you may have your pandemic plan ready. If so, you are in the “ahead” group. Until recent weeks, it has not appeared that this pandemic could be severe. In the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that the pandemic could be “more virulent” than expected.
In other words, the real warning flag is up now.
- If workers feel like it, can they work from home? If not, how can the business operate with a reduced work force?
- Depending on how ill they are, they may not be well enough to work even if working from home is an option.
- It appears that sick people can infect others for a longer period of time than usually is true of the flu. The story below says that coughs may be a better indicator of who’s still infectious than a fever. Neither symptom should be taken lightly.
- Although the story below does not mention this, if a small business had a number of workers sickened in the spring, the expectation is that once someone has had it, that person will have immunity for round two. For those small businesses, the worst could be behind them.
Small businesses can be the most adroit at dealing with economic downturns or the hardest hit. It depends on what sector they are in and how skillful their owners are at grappling with the impact.
Small businesses do not usually have the kind of planning staffs to prepare for situations such as a pandemic—-nor the in-house expertise to read their own situations and anticipate how to respond to them.
Those which may be best prepared may be those in places in which there is a known risk of natural disasters, such as any business which is subject to frequent hurricane watches and warnings. Those people know how to move fast if they have to. Even so, the pandemic is not a storm which is over in a matter of days and which is a familiar threat. (Katrina was an exception.) Buying plywood to board up windows is nothing like coping with a pandemic. They only happen every three or four decades, more or less.
They may belong to associations, which can provide them with guidance, which is the next best thing—-but that guidance still must be tailored to that specific business.
If the economy already has hit a small business hard, then the pandemic surely will not help it get back on its feet.
The urgent need for small businesses to be ready in many ways has been underscored by the Department of Homeland Security’s new guidelines.
“Owners of small businesses should be prepared to operate with fewer employees this fall as swine flu spreads, federal officials said yesterday.
“The Department of Homeland Security is issuing flu guidelines to small businesses, which employ about half of the workers in the private sector. (Emphasis added)
“They play a key role in protecting the health and safety of the country,’’ Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said. (Emphasis added)
“Also yesterday, researchers reported that many people spread swine flu for a week or more after symptoms appear, and that coughing may be a better sign than fever for telling who is contagious.
“Health officials have been telling people to avoid contact with others for a day after their fever goes away. The new research suggests they may need to be careful for longer, especially at home, where the risk of spreading the germ is highest.
“You’re probably contagious for about a week,’’ said Dr. Gaston De Serres, a scientist at the Institute of Public Health in Quebec.”
Source: Boston.com, September 15, 20o9
Source: Associated Press, September 15, 2009
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