The post referencing the how fragile modern Networked Ecomonies are by martinfocazio and the article in New Scientist magazine made me go and find a copy, as Martin says it makes interesting reading.

However alongside it is a related article looking at the impact of a pandemic, with quotes from various academics and the likes of Jon Lay, head of global emergency preparedness for ExxonMobil it is fairly levelheaded, but it makes for disturbing reading. These are some of the key points:

1) Most cities only have three days supply of food on hand
2) US plans for a pandemic call for people to store 3 weeks of food and water
3) Some planners think people should have 10 weeks worth
4) However stockpiling once it begins will not be achievable or affordable
5) Most (US) hopitals only have two days worth of Oxygen supplies on hand with blood and drugs not too far behind.
6) Absenteeism is the big worry, either through people being ill or staying away from work to avoid catching the illness [this is acknowledged as the best thing to do if you want to avoid it]
7) Absenteeism will mean that critical distribution and transport networks will break down
8) Many businesses expect their staff to be able to work online from home in a crisis, however models show there will not be enough bandwidth to go around
9) Absenteeism will also mean that critical industrial processes and sites will need to be shutdown due to safety concerns of running them with insufficient staff*
10) If the power goes off** for an extended period of time (days) then you have industrial refrigeration failures, water purification system failures, etc. The longer it is off the greater the knock on effect.

* As the recent precautionary shutdown of the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland in advance of strike action by one of the unions on site illustrated. They only expected around 30% of the staff to be on strike but said they could not operate the plant safely with that number absent. It also shutdown the Natural Gas distribution network that flows through the site from the North Sea into the UK network.

** Due to lack of staff, or lack of say, coal, due to transport issues.

The article goes on to say most of the models assume death rates the same as the mild 1957 and 1968 pandemics or occasionally the 1918 pandemic [the latter assumes a 3% mortality rate or 142 million deaths worldwide]. However to date H5N1 has a mortality rate of 63 per cent in humans. To quote one of the academics "It is negligent to assume that if H5N1 bird flu goes pandemic that it will become less deadly".