We ran a massive viral pandemic simulation. What we learned
In October 2019, participants at a pandemic response exercise called Event 201 were confronted with a hypothetical scenario to test the world’s preparedness for a viral disease outbreak.
2020-03-13 19:00:00 - World Economic Forum
After the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic John's Hopkins Centre for public health issued the following statement:
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China.
To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.
We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.