Recent headlines about Hantavirus and Ebola sparked a familiar reaction: “Is this the next pandemic?” But that framing misses important lessons for business leaders using COVID-19 as the only precedent that could leave an organization open to a range of risks.
The short answer is that both Ebola and Hantavirus won’t compare. The current Ebola outbreak in Congo is ongoing, but the threat outside affected region remains low. Hantavirus, too, does not present a similar global threat. However, the longer and more important answer for business leaders is this: It doesn’t need to be COVID-19 to expose gaps in your organization’s resilience.
The Post-COVID Illusion of Preparedness
During COVID-19, organizations adapted at unprecedented speed. Many shifted their entire workforces to remote operations. They activated crisis management structures, in some cases creating them from scratch in the moment and rewrote business continuity plans in real time.
But in the years since, many organizations have quietly drifted toward a dangerous assumption: what worked in 2020 is sufficient for what comes next. Even more recent crises, like the war in the Middle East, focused more on evacuation than on wholesale crisis response, typically resulting in no changes to an organization’s crisis management capabilities
In reality, the operating environment has changed since COVID. Businesses naturally evolve through mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and technology transformation. Many companies now look fundamentally different than they did more than five years ago. Yet their resilience frameworks often do not reflect that evolution. In fact, many organizations have gotten more complacent since COVID, operating under the assumption that if “we could handle that period, we can handle anything.” This has resulted in the neglect of crisis management and business continuity capabilities, which have become outdated, unpracticed and unreliable.
The Scenario Most Companies Haven’t Planned For
COVID-19 forced organizations to plan for disruption, including remote work, supply chain interruption and operational continuity under constraint. What it did not force them to plan for was large-scale workforce loss. That distinction matters.
The COVID pandemic disrupted the world because of its scale, but mortality rates were lower than recent outbreaks. Case fatalities in the U.S. were roughly around 1%. Measures focused on operational continuity under constraint were generally sufficient or even effective.
A higher-fatality biological event (such as the 30-40% mortality rate in certain hantavirus strains and the 25-90% fatality rates in past Ebola outbreaks) introduces a very different set of challenges for both individuals and organizations. Hantavirus and Ebola, while far less transmissible to the everyday public, represent a different kind of threat: one where severity, not spread, became the defining variable.
This can manifest in several ways.
- Extended workforce withdrawal driven by fear
- Loss of key individuals in leadership or specialized roles
- Loss of workforces that operate in contained environments like manufacturing facilities
- Lower recovery timelines due to both physical and psychological impacts
With significantly higher mortality in severe cases, the question shifts from continuity of operations to continuity of decision-making capacity.
Where Resilience Programs Are Quietly Vulnerable
Hantavirus and Ebola are useful reminders that biological threats are not uniform and each profile creates a different type of organizational stress. And biological threats are just one of many different types of incidents organizations face in today’s business environment. Let’s not forget about wars, the impact of AI and workplace violence events increasingly expanding beyond the US to other parts of the world people otherwise felt safe in. These are just a few examples of the broader range of risks organizations now face, many of which are not receiving the attention they require.
Final Questions for Leadership Teams
Answering some basic questions can help you assess whether your resilience capabilities have stalled post COVID, or are built to last:
- When was the last time your crisis management and business continuity plans were reviewed and refreshed?
- Are those plans all-hazards in nature and roles based, designed to help an organization face any type of crisis, biological or otherwise?
- Have those plans and teams been tested in the last year?
- How are you tracking and monitoring the risks most concerning to your organization and its ability to withstand them should they materialize?
- Is your approach to succession planning a living process that accounts for the potential loss of critical personnel at all levels of the organization, or is it largely a check-the-box exercise focused only on senior leadership?
The right question is not whether you are ready for another COVID pandemic. It’s looking forward to the next fundamentally different disruption. Resilience is not defined by how your organization reacted in 2020. It is about your response to the next crises, even when it looks nothing like the last.