I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this!
Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".
Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...
Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".