Back in October 2019, a group of officials, academics, and business leaders gathered in New York City to role-play a scenario wherein a novel coronavirus outbreak led to a deadly pandemic. The simulation, called Event 201, projected a virus originating from livestock in Brazil, spreading to nations like Portugal, the United States, and China, ultimately resulting in the death of 65 million people within 18 months.
Event 201 was just one of the many pandemic war games conducted in the two decades leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, intended to prepare officials for the possibility of a pandemic. In mid-2020, news outlets published several articles on these simulations, noting their prescience in some respects while also highlighting their blind spots. However, as the pandemic progressed, it became clear that the simulations failed to account for some of the significant challenges posed in the real world, including the politicization of public health, new virus variants, and vaccine hesitancy.
Although simulating for the specific facts of the COVID-19 pandemic may improve the realism of future war games, experts argue that it does not guarantee their substantive value. These exercises aim to prepare officials for what might happen in future pandemics rather than what will happen. Many war-gamers differentiate between tabletop exercises and functional exercises. While the former involve discussing scenarios, the latter actually involve executing them, such as transporting stockpiled resources or caring for pretend patients at a hospital.
Experts argue that pandemic exercises need to be more challenging and intense than they currently are, so that participants experience failure and learn from mistakes. Such exercises not only help raise public awareness of pandemic risks but also serve to remind us that the next pandemic could be very different from what we have experienced so far. While lived experience is valuable, relying on it alone is insufficient, as it represents only a small fraction of the range of possibilities. War games provide a way to learn from past experiences while remaining open to future possibilities.
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