It’s time for businesses to ensure they have an outbreak plan. The disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) could strike this province hard. And if, by some miracle, SARS peters out worldwide, that’s no guarantee we won’t see a serious outbreak or two in our lifetimes.
This is not about panic, it’s about prudence.
Is your workplace equipped to have employees work from home? If you’re in a service industry especially, are you going to be able to find preventive masks? Who will compensate employees who are quarantined? If you lose a key employee, what will you do?
Rogers AT&T in Ottawa temporarily lost 40 employees when the spouse of one worker in a phone room became ill with SARS. Naturally, all those who had come into close contact with the spouse were quarantined. That’s a big hit.
When an employee of RioCan Property Services Inc. in Calgary came back from Hong Kong recently, the company told her to stay home for a couple of weeks. It might cost a few bucks and some inconvenience to lose one worker for a fortnight, but that pales in comparison to having to close down an entire office, and perhaps lose more than one worker permanently.
This balancing act is becoming increasingly common, and it is having a noticeable effect on the bottom line of businesses, even in Alberta. No one really knows who should pay the salaries of quarantined staff, so it will probably be you! But failure to deal with this threat would cost us all dearly, since SARS is a disease that requires extensive hospitalization in most cases.
People don’t have to die to cause disaster, they just have to tie up all the hospital beds.
If prevention, then, is the best medicine, how do we prevent the spread of SARS?
If you have tried to buy an N-95 mask (they filter out 95 per cent of non-oil particles in the air) from a medical supply store in Calgary recently, you have likely failed, because most (if not all) have sold out.
Blain-Maclean had a waiting list of 35 people and counting last week.
In Edmonton the shelves are not as bare, but many stores in the capital region also report selling out stock as fast as it comes in.
Many of the pharmacies and medical supply stores I surveyed figure that some of the large orders for the protective masks are due to speculators stocking up, betting that the $2 - $5 masks could soon be worth twice that or more on the street.
This was borne out when some sellers even appeared on the streets of unaffected (as of this writing) Edmonton.
Many of the purchasers, however, say they are buying masks in bulk to send to relations in China, where the gear is now virtually impossible to procure.
One of the manufacturers of the dust masks, 3M, has put its entire production facilities into high gear, 24 hours a day. However, it’s not entirely clear whether or not the N-95 masks even help prevent SARS.
But in this globalized world, a market for masks in China creates a run on the shelves of Edmonton. So, if you want to ensure you get a mask for yourself or your staff, at least for a reasonable price, the window of opportunity may be closing.
The only stores that had any reasonable stock of N-95 masks were the large hardware stores, such as Home Depot and Revy. None of them said they were jacking up their prices.
Being unable to shield yourself or your employees from SARS is one of the major problems that business should be working to address today. But there are others.
The New York Times has reported that important companies in Hong Kong, such as HSBC and JP Morgan Chase, have split their firms’ most important units into groups, working either in different locations or shifts so that if one unit is quarantined, the whole company will not have to shut down.
The economic hardship is going far beyond the airlines, where so much of the media have focused. In Hong Kong, shops have closed, markets are deserted and hotels are emptying out. Motorola has shut down an entire shift of a plant in Singapore.
It’s important to recognize that Hong Kong and Singapore are not back-waters but highly developed societies.
If SARS can spread there despite containment measures, we should be afraid.
Medical science is not reassuring me. We are facing a new agent with an unknown mode of transmission.
Dr. Edward Ishiguro, a microbiologist from the University of Victoria, told me that when he was in medical school 30 years ago, the underlying assumption was that all microbes had been discovered, only their mechanisms needed defining.
Now we know how foolish those assumptions were. We should be humbled by that. Ishiguro figures that since his school days, 30 infectious agents, including ebola, have newly evolved or been discovered. He attributes the moving targets to the amazing “plasticity” of rudimentary microbes.
The only really surprising thing is that no more of the infectious agents we’ve faced over the past 30 years have been highly virulent and contagious.
Some people credit advances in medical science for the lull. There is a very optimistic fellow, John Rogers, who works next door to Business Edge’s office. He’s the president of The Rogers Financial Group. Placing his confidence in modern medicine, he figures the West will be able to arrest new infections that might strike our planet. Outbreaks concerned him a decade or more ago, but today we can nip these problems in the bud, he says. In other words, we’ve finally figured it out.
But I lack his confidence. We live in an increasingly interconnected world. Medical science has let us down before. We cannot quarantine an entire country, like China, where SARS is clearly rampant.
So with this brand new microbe on the scene that “only” kills three to four per cent of the people who get it and disables healthy survivors for a month, we may have to get used to it.
That’s not to say there might not be an upside to the equation.
If you are a speculator, you might anticipate all that cheap real estate that might come on the market, if SARS ravages the world leaving millions of people dead. All economic news is good news, if you are on the right side of the deal.
But for three to four per cent of us, it might be the biggest loss of all.
