Sixty People Are Sick Overnight

Your hotline logs 60 attendees with vomiting and diarrhoea before 7am. Day two starts in two hours and nobody knows yet whether it is the food, the water, or a virus moving person to person.

Setting: Incentive travel programme, 500 guests, resort property, morning of day 2. Category: Safety & First Response. Pressure level: Critical.

This page is the individual, citable address for this one situation: https://gatheringarchitecture.com/crisis-sim/scenario/illness-outbreak

The situation

Your duty manager has a list of 60 room numbers. The resort's director says it is 'probably the shellfish' and wants to keep it quiet through checkout. Your first activity, a group cooking class, begins at 9:00.

First moves and what each one costs

• Notify public health and the venue's medical officer immediately, suspend all shared-food activity, and hold the day's programme — Investigators are on site by 10:00. Suspending shared food removes the most likely transmission route while you still do not know the cause.
• Change the menu, run the programme, and monitor — If it is norovirus, the menu is irrelevant and a hands-on cooking class is the perfect spreader. By evening the count is 140.
• Let the resort handle it and keep your guests uninformed — The resort has a commercial interest in quiet. Your guests are your responsibility and they are being told nothing.

Preparation notes for this situation

• Call public health early: they can identify the source faster than the venue can, and calling protects you
• Norovirus spreads by contact and surfaces, so hand sanitiser alone will not stop it — soap, water and cleaning will
• Isolate the affected, not the whole group, and never make sick guests explain themselves publicly
• Preserve food samples and service records the moment illness is reported

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