Event 201
Pandemic Scenario - Event 201
Scenarios have been regularly used, like a 'war game' to simulate a global event such as a pandemic, which would assist governments and organisations to identify requirements for resources, communications, medical supplies, personnel and facilities so that if such an event did occur the response could be better managed.
Scenarios like Event 201 are not planning in the sense of a plan to unleash a disease but rather to assist planning for a naturally occurring disease outbreak.
Event 201 (2019)
Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.
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There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.
Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Event 201Source
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to significant publicity of this event, to which John Hopkins (Bloomberg School of Public Health) responded as quoted below:-
Statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise
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.
Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise
Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Event 201 https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/