Novel Coronavirus

3/13/20
All,
Something I didn’t mention in this morning’s call was that I was very pleasantly surprised to learn, when all this COVID-19 thing began to unfold, was that my company already had a Pandemic Policy. I’d forgotten that it had been developed for the H5N1 Pandemic several years ago. We didn’t develop it ourselves. We used one of the on-line templates and guidelines from the internet and then customized those to our company’s situation. There are several of these templates and guidelines on-line which greatly simplified the process. The real advantage to doing this is that the exercise forced our leadership team to sit down and give focused consideration to how we would deal with four levels of pandemic “urgency” i.e. what things are mission critical, who specifically would be needed on site, who could work from home, who could be sent home, revised travel policies, how to deal with travelers, etc. The four levels of “urgency” in the plan ( 1-yellow, 2-orange, 3-red, 4-black) are based on how easily the disease is transmitted among people and the proximity of cases to our location. As conditions worsen, our responses increase. Currently, we’re officially at level two, but as soon as we have a case in the Fargo area, we’ll go to level three. At level two, we begin to consider “split operations”, not allowing critical people to work in the same location. By level three, quite a few people are working from home or remotely. These are all practical responses and I’m glad we considered them beforehand.