Has the pig flown?
Swine flu is in the air. After a brief flurry of panicky news reports, what we’re hearing now is that it’s not so bad, not such a big deal, and so forth.
A common event that I’ve seen at company after company is that when someone spends all night fixing a bug that they caused, they are a hero; however, the person who went home at 5pm after carefully checking their work and making sure they didn’t have any major bugs is told they aren’t working hard enough.
An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but people believe in the cure far more than the prevention. Heroics are always far more exciting than quietly making sure that the problem doesn’t happen in the first place.
We don’t know yet why the swine flu outbreak is turning out to be mild. To some extent, this may be due to the virus being wimpy. It may also be due to the precautions that are being taken. It’s not clear that we’ll ever be able to tell.
What we do know is that flu pandemics come around on a fairly regular basis. We also know that the 1918 pandemic started with a mild, “wimpy,” wave in the spring and summer before turning into the deadly outbreak of the fall.
When I ran a Pandemic Flu simulation exercise in Washington DC during the summer of 2006, the response to the flu was disastrous. Fortunately, the previous and current adminstrations learned from that and other exercises; the current administration is taking all the right steps.
I’m wondering what the public reaction will be if the flu continues to be “wimpy?” Will the administration be seen as having panicked, or as having taken reasonable precautions?
If the swine flu turns out to be nothing this summer, what will happen if it comes back in the fall?
Put another way, is it a waste of time to play it safe? It is in many companies, or at least it’s not nearly as popular as going for heroics.
