Event 201

Pandemic Scenarios

Event 201 is one of several exercises used to prepare governments and organisations for a pandemic.

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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 201^Source

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/

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (caused by SARS-CoV-2)