{"id":171,"date":"2023-06-29T14:07:08","date_gmt":"2023-06-29T14:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/?p=171"},"modified":"2023-06-29T14:07:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-29T14:07:09","slug":"who-could-have-predicted-covid19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/2023\/06\/29\/who-could-have-predicted-covid19\/","title":{"rendered":"Who could have predicted COVID19?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The emergence of COVID-19 caught the world off guard, leaving many to question if anyone could have predicted such a devastating pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, reflecting on the hypothetical scenario of having a five-month advance warning of COVID-19, it is worth considering how this knowledge would have influenced your business.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The impact of such early awareness would have likely prompted significant changes in business strategies, operations, and risk management approaches to mitigate the effects of the impending crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While pandemics can emerge unexpectedly from nowhere, it is essential to evaluate whether the impact on businesses could have been reduced with advanced knowledge.&nbsp; Implementing an integrated Risk Management Framework, such as our own Risk Management Framework (Insert link to this page), allows organisations to identify and address potential risks proactively.&nbsp; As part of our framework, we implement an effective HILP (High Impact, Low Probability) process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By integrating this HILP process within the framework and utilising key risk indicators (KRIs) along with horizon scanning processes, businesses can be better equipped to anticipate and prepare for low-probability, high-impact events like pandemics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Under our HILP process, our clients were able to identify activities that could limit the impact of a pandemic should one occur, we did this by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Identifying key staff and single points of failure<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Providing them with laptops<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ensuring network bandwidth was adequate to facilitate homeworking<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ensuring that they worked from home on a regular basis as well as during Crisis Management tests<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>These activities added only minimal overhead to the business but ensured that essential operations could continue remotely during a crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the pandemic hit and while others were side-lined by COVID19 our;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>monitoring of KRI\u2019s (in this case number of staff of ill and length of time off) allowed us to identify that something was not right back in October 2019, nearly 5 months before COVID19 hit mainstream news.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>monitoring of government web sites identified that the pandemic risk report which is produced every 2 years was not produced for 2019, the report documents the output of pandemic testing, lack of this report indicated that the government was not ready for a pandemic.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>monitoring of global news feeds was identifying issues in China, and awareness of the Chinese New Year and how Chinese citizens travel around the world at this time of year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Of themselves these seem un-related but by actively monitoring key risk indicators, government reports, and global news feeds, we were able to give an early warning of the potential for a pandemic to our clients and encourage them to test their processes in preparation for such an event, even though we were not aware of the specifics of the COVID-19 pandemic at that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The emergence of COVID-19 caught the world off guard, leaving many to question if anyone&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[9,10,14,11,15,13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ermf.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}