**1. Introduction**

## **1.1 Handling a disaster: "the remedy can be worse than the disease"**

Any manufacturing site can be affected by a disaster, caused either by natural phenomena (flood, earthquake, fire, landslide, typhoon, tsunami, etc.) or by people (theft, arson, terrorism, vandalism, etc.).

Experience demonstrates that in the situation of stress, which follows a disaster, people are prone to take wrong decisions that could even aggravate the consequences of the incident.

Mismanagement can be avoided if a site has previously developed an "emergency management plan", intended as a roadmap for the satisfactory treatment of a given incident and for preventing the implementation of arbitrary measures.

This study develops a model of rationale to prepare a hands-on plan based on risk management.

## **1.2 COVID-19, another kind of disaster**

A new single-strain positive (+) RNE virus, belonging to the Coronaviridae family, was detected in 2019. It was called SARS-CoV-2 and the respiratory disease that it causes became known as COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) [1].

#### *Risk Management*

The dissemination of this virus on a planetary scale has created a global situation of "Public Health Emergency by COVID-19", which we will shorten in PHEC-19 [2].

Although we cannot anticipate the evolution and the final consequences of this pandemic, we already know that it has dramatically upset human activities in a completely unexpected way and we can consider it another type of disaster for many manufacturing plants that were forced to manage a problem for which they were not prepared.

We are going to analyze how PHEC-19 can affect the functionality of manufacturing plants and propose a management model derived from the general model proposed for disaster handling.
