In October 2019, just a few months before a novel coronavirus sparked a deadly pandemic, a group of government officials, business leaders, and academics convened in New York City to role-play a scenario in which a novel coronavirus sparked a deadly pandemic. Their imagined virus leaped from livestock to farmers in Brazil, then spread to Portugal, the United States, and China. Soon, it was everywhere. Eighteen months later, 65 million people were dead.
This simulation, known as Event 201, was one of dozens of so-called pandemic war games run in the two decades leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19. In mid-2020, as the world came to terms with its new pandemic reality, media outlets published a flood of articles about these simulations. Some highlighted their prescience, others their blind spots. But the real-world crisis that occasioned this review was only a few months old. Whatever hindsight it provided wasn’t yet in focus, because many of the greatest challenges of the pandemic—new variants, vaccine hesitancy, the hyper-politicization of public health—were still to come.
Almost three years later, we know that the war-gamers whiffed on many of these longer-term outcomes. Pre-pandemic role-plays successfully predicted early events like the overwhelming of the nation’s hospitals, ineffective travel bans, and a lack of coordination across levels of government. But they underestimated the significance of masking policies, the speed at which vaccines would be developed, and the politicized backlash to those interventions. They also failed to account for cascading viral evolution, and did not grasp how long such a crisis could last. “The scenario ends at the 18-month point,” the makers of Event 201 wrote. “The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80–90% of the global population has been exposed.” If only.
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