Sue,
 
I don't envy you the task. A pandemic presents an alomost infinite number of variables. I suppose basing planning on the worst case secnario would make some sense.
 
So maybe a long incubation period with a summer outbreak would give a broad distribution and impact the most people at the worst time. I guess a contact and airborne illness with 75% infection rate with a 30-100% mortality rate. 
 
You could count on your borders being closed all shipping, air, and ground transport halted, a media blackout, internet access initially stopped. something like 80% of your GNP is based on U.S. business and the border is closed. All exchanges are halted. The power grid along with all vital resources will fall under military control. All resources will be prioritized centally and enforced by the military (not ncesarilly yours). 
 
The number of international visitors will strain the availble resources. Your more advantaged citizens will have fled urban areas (including IT and overpaid Records Manager). Initially everyone will most likely be told to stay home. Critical personnel will be pulled in to deal with the situation based on central requirement.
 
So hopefully, All information is backed up and distributed to secure offsite locatin that do not require a power source. Information stored on servers may be corrupted after sitting unspun for 12-18 months. Harcopy processes will have stopped (paper will spread the dsiease). 
 
Family first, you can count on staff being unwilling to leave their families to come back to a potentially unsafe environment. Likely Peter will have been locked in his records center by his staff and Larry will still be going the strong, the rest of the Records world will have to look to itself. Those operations vital to the common good will be in operation, records staff working working in the bottled water industry will be working, the widget industry RMs will be in survival mode. If my staff is considered essential to the effort it is unlikely that I will be given the choice, but if I am I  will look to those that are unmarried and have no children first. Cross training is always a sound business model, IMO. However it puts a strain on the bottom line. Given a choice, staff is cross trained and in this case cross trained staff would be most desireable in maintaining or restarting the operation, however, we are back the family first question.Paper based systems would present some interesting issues. They maycreate a smaller inprint on the power grid, but you would need to have a means to irradiate the paper that may be contaminated to reduce the likelyhood of starting up another breakout. Given that half the records Center staff has perished in the pandemic, how do you plan to enforce a contract (sure none of the lawyers died but....)
Is your baseline differnet? What model are you working from?
Hockey will be cancelled for at least two years. The sport barely survived the strike. Of course the Manitoba fans and teams will still be around, no germ would get passed the first winter. 
 
 
Chris Flynn
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