Hospital Goes from Computers to Paper and Pen After Computer Virus Infection

The Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia, suffered a serious computer virus infection that temporarily disabled their services, the medical facility being able to provide help only to those who had extreme emergencies.

WSBTV reports that the virus affected the hospital’s networks, employees being forced to turn back to the good old fashioned paper and pen to perform their tasks.

“We've had a virus to interrupt our system within our hospital,” revealed a Gwinnett Medical Center representative. “It's not affecting patient care in any way, shape or form.”

Fortunately, only the network connections were affected by the virus that allegedly quickly spread from a device to the other. The databases that contain medical records and other patient information were not harmed.

On Wednesday, the facility declared “total diversion,” which resulted in the fact that most of the patients had to be redirected to other hospitals. Two days later the status changed to “trauma diversion” and by Saturday, the online systems were back on track.

“We actually have some of our IT vendor partners that are on site with us that have actually been here since Wednesday,” the representative said. “We've also got internal teams that are trying to identify the virus issues.”

The source of the virus is currently unknown, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone if one of the employees opened a malicious email that either warned of a security update or maybe even some fabulous offer that just couldn’t have been turned down.

This is not the first time when we see such incidents. A month ago, the computer systems utilized by the St John's ambulance service in New Zealand were disabled temporarily, after a piece of malware infected their computers.

At the time, the situation was just as alarming since the affected center handles more than 1 million calls each year.