The Noggin Blog

The scale of the COVID-19 disruption to what had long been normal working arrangements has been unprecedented. Take remote work: an early April 2020 MIT survey revealed that nearly a third of all workers in the U.S. who had been employed the month before were working from home, up from five percent in 2017.

At the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, more than 70 percent of employers admitted not having a pandemic plan in place. That glaring lack of planning suggests that your clients might not be as prepared as they think to resume normal working operations, now that the conversation has shifted to business recovery.

After months of disruption, organizations are eager to return to normal as part of the recovery lifecycle. For many, that means resuming operations in work facilities vacated due to local, state, and national lockdown orders.

We’ve all seen the stories. The rapid spread of the coronavirus has caused demand spikes for personal protective equipment (PPE), with healthcare workers in areas hardest hit by the spread of the virus reporting alarming shortages of PPE like masks, gowns, and shields.

At this point, the majority of people who get COVID-19 only experience mild symptoms. But one in six become seriously ill, according to the World Health Organization. Throughout the entirety of the crisis, those numbers have carried serious implications for the healthcare COVID-19 response, as the resultant severe disease has caused hospitalization, even admission to an intensive care unit for weekslong stints.

With the spread of the coronavirus, the health and safety of our workers is back in the news. Indeed, frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic – their heroism matched only by the level of safety risk they court to do their jobs, with data sources showing a disproportionate number of healthcare workers among those infected with the coronavirus.

Frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In areas hard hit by the rapid spread of the coronavirus, like Lombardy, New York City, and New Orleans, stories of the noble sacrifices of healthcare workers who have had to risk their personal safety to treat patients without an adequate stock of personal protective equipment (PPE) have proliferated – incomplete data sources point to at least 5,400 healthcare workers COVID-19 infections in the U.S. alone, with dozens of deaths.

The Incident Command System sprung out of a fire suppression event in the 1970s. But it didn’t take too long for non-fire organizations to begin using the system, as well.

The question is now as emergency response agencies mobilize against the COVID-19 pandemic, can ICS be relevant to their efforts?

Over the past few weeks, Noggin, a global leader in crisis and business continuity software solutions, has received press coverage from national news outlets including: Channel 7, The Daily Telegraph, news.com.au, NT News, Weekly Times, and more - for its its free COVID-19 Response software.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has already disrupted major parts of the world economy. Working supply chains, in particular, are frayed to their breaking points, with air traffic and other forms of free movement ground to a near halt. What does it all mean for you clients and how can you support them?