The Ministry of Health has moved its pandemic response status to Phase 6 - 6.2 Code Yellow which can include declaring a public health emergency at a local or national level and restrictions on our borders, isolating affected areas of the country, restricting public gatherings and closing educational facilities. Clinical director of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service, Dr Julia Peters, said these new cases could require school closures and "We're probably close to those sorts of measures," she said.

The upshot of that is that organisational pandemic response plans will almost certainly need to be implemented. At Australia's Curtin University they are pushing VPN as a technology solution

Curtin University CIO Peter Nikoletatos has asked faculty staff to download a VPN client on their home computers as part of a contingency plan against a Swine Flu pandemic.

The spread of Swine Flu, which now numbers over one thousand infections in Australia, has forced CIOs around the globe to adjust their business continuity plans.

Nikoletatos said the Swine Flu is particularly troubling to Universities as academic staff are constantly travelling to domestic and international locations (the United States and Victoria among them, he said), whilst lecture theatres often squeeze 500-odd students into the same room.

"Swine Flu is problematic," Nikoletatos told the Australian Industry Group's Digital Technologies Summit yesterday.

"We had to consider, could we effectively carry on teaching if we shut down the campus? Is the whole program available online? The answer - absolutely not."

Curtin University's crisis management team has subsequently put together a plan - of which the IT department's first port of call was to encourage staff to download a VPN client for secure remote access to University resources.

Curtin staff and students have had a VPN client available to them for some time for access to shared drives.

But most staff have neglected to download it as "they feel they have all that's necessary to them at home via web access to email and calendaring on our portal," the CIO said.

At the current rate, such a casual response will quickly cease. As institutions and classees empty out and studfents try to work from home, lecturers and teachers will find their working life turned inside out. Instead of being able to deliver a single lecture to many students in one palce, they will suddenly have to provide essentially individual teaching to all of those who can reach the network.

OK, what's your plan? How much do you depend on being able to deal with people in groups rather than individually. What role doesa OCT play in your pandemic response? How have you tested it?

Details in the comments please.

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