Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

According to the UK Guardian, 38% of British businesses still don’t have a pandemic plan (for example, how does a business cope if 40% of employees are off work either sick, or caring for sick family members?), and there are serious doubts growing about British Telecom’s ability to maintain internet access when millions of Brits try and work from home, or just get on the net for news and entertainment, during Mexico-style city-wide quarantines and curfews :

…international business continuity expert Lyndon Bird…. was also sceptical about the ability of Britain’s digital infrastructure to cope with hundreds of thousands of people being forced to work from home.BT could not give “definitive” assurances that Britain’s broadband network would work fully because of the vast numbers of people logging on from home, he said.

Being stuck at home and not having internet access during a nationwide, or global, emergency is unimaginable. Of course, access to the internet will also depend on whether or not your local electricity supplier can keep up with the daily maintenance when half the workforce is sick, or recovering.

Does your radio have fresh batteries?

According to another UK Guardian article, flu experts were caught “off guard” by the HumanBirdPig Flu virus spread reaching pandemic levels. Apparently, they were all planning for avian influenza, H5N1, to be responsible for what we were told would be an “inevitable
pandemic” :

Dr Alan Hay, director of the London-based World Influenza Centre, said the extensive summer outbreak in Britain had not followed expected patterns and warned the Department of Health needed to be prepared for a more deadly form of the disease.

The flu surveillance community had been “caught napping” by the emergence of the swine flu outbreak as most resources were concentrated on guarding against a bird flu pandemicHay, who advises the World Health Organisation on its flu policy, said it had become clear the flu pandemic was predominantly affecting children aged five to 14, with the majority of cases nationally and internationally affecting people under 30.

Flu surveillance scientists, who had been concentrating resources on looking for a bird flu pandemic, had been surprised by the swine flu outbreak, he added.

“We were not anticipating a virus of this nature causing a pandemic. All our eyes were focusing on the H5N1 virus that had been circulating in wild and domestic poultry populations.

“We have been observing similar viruses to this pandemic in pigs in the past 10 years in the US. And because it was antigenically related to the viruses already circulating – it was the same H1N1 subtype – it was not perceived as being a major threat. Of course we were caught napping, you might say, but this is what has transpired.

“We don’t really know the way this virus might change as it adapts to the human population and what the consequences of such changes might be.”

Depopulation, probably.

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