Plan, What Plan?

11/16/2006
Workers Unclear About Employers' Plans for Pandemic Flu

Few working people (19 percent) are aware of any plan at their workplace to respond to a serious outbreak of pandemic flu, according to a survey conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Twenty-two percent of employed adults said they are very or somewhat worried that if a severe outbreak of Pandemic flu occurred in their community, their employer would make them go to work even if they were sick. Half of respondents said that they believe that their workplace would stay open if public health officials recommended that some businesses in their community should shut down.

The survey asked employed respondents what they would do if public health officials said you should stay home from work, but their employer told them to come to work. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they would stay at home, and 35 percent of respondents said they would go to work.

Thirty-five percent of respondents said they think that if they stayed home from work, they would still get paid; 42 percent said they think they would not get paid, and 22 percent do not know whether they would get paid or not.

The survey also asked employed respondents about the problems they might have if they were asked to stay out of work for seven to ten days, a month, and three months because of an outbreak of pandemic flu in their community.

The longer people are out of work, the greater the number of people who will face financial problems. While most employed people (74 percent) said that they believe they could miss seven to ten days of work without having serious financial problems, one in four (25 percent) said they would face such problems. A majority (57 percent) said that they think they would have serious financial problems if they had to miss work for one month, and a total of three-fourths (76 percent) said they would have such problems if they were away from work for three months.

Only about three in ten respondents (29 percent) said that if they had to stay away from the workplace for one month, they would be able to work from home for that long.

"These findings are a wake-up call for business, that employees have serious financial concerns and are unclear about the workplace plans and policies for dealing with pandemic flu," says Robert J. Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health.

A pandemic flu is a human outbreak of a global scale, and it spreads easily among humans. There is no pandemic flu currently, but public health officials are concerned about a strain of avian flu. Avian flu occurs naturally in birds and can be transmitted from birds to humans. The current strain of avian flu is the H5N1 virus. Among humans, there is no immunity and the fatality rate for avian flu is 50 percent of diagnosed cases. So far, the avian flu cannot be easily transmitted from human to human. However, health officials are concerned that the H5N1 virus could mutate and become easily transmitted among humans. from BenefitsNext USA