About a month after the appearance of this virus, the President's Consulting Committee was urgently convened for the first time….
…. According to the keynote speaker, so far there have been more than 400 cases of infection with this virus and about 50 deaths from this new infection. The virus is spread mainly in Frankfurt, Germany and Caracas, Venezuela …..
…. Patients are admitted to hospitals with fever, cough and confusion caused by a sudden rise in temperature. In some cases, doctors define the diagnosis as encephalitis and cerebral edema, as a result of which many patients fall into an irreversible coma….
…. Radically urged by White House officials, the researchers were finally able to isolate what appears to be an unidentified pathogen that causes these diseases ….
…. The virus is a new type of parainfluenza virus from the family of respiratory viruses that commonly cause mild illnesses such as colds and fevers. However, at the moment, scientists studying the disease could not determine how the new virus fits into the parainfluenza family, so at the moment the code parainfluenza Clade X… is assigned to the pathogen.
…. Health authorities report that Clade X is transmitted by airborne droplets, an incubation period of up to a week, which gives the new virus terrifying pandemic potential….
Scared? So far, there is nothing to worry about, since the described situation is fictitious and is part of an operational-tactical scenario of anti-epidemic exercises, on the eve of the Johns Hopkins Medicine or JHM, a center that brings together doctors and researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and specialists from the Medical System. Johns Hopkins University).
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The exercise scenario was designed to assess and see how real policy experts and government decision makers would respond to a similar situation.
However, in addition to the fact that the Clade X virus does not exist in nature, everything else was as close to realism as possible, including the involvement of medical laboratories, institutions and other resources, whose personnel were really informed about the upcoming global catastrophe.
The "Clade X" simulation was played in real time and the people acting on the simulation script were the very officials, virologists, doctors and other people who would react to a similar situation in real life.
Among those unaware of the simulation "players" were, in particular, the former Senate faction leader Tom Dashle, the representative of the state of Indiana Susan Brooks, the former director of the CDC Julie Gerberding and many other officials with one or another experience of fighting epidemics.
In a closed mode, that is, without explaining the real situation to the employees, the simulation has been operating since May 15, with the gradual dedication of some of the health officials to the essence of the game. And its results horrified the organizers of the exercises.
According to two months of experimental experience and further calculations based on it, 20 months after May 15, the "Clade X" virus should have killed about 15 million people in the United States and another 150 million around the world.
“I think we've learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, dedicated senior government officials who have gone through many crises still have a hard time facing something like this,” Eric Toner, senior fellow at the Center for Global Johns Hopkins Center's Health Safety and Exercise Scriptor Clade X. “And it's not that these people are not good, not smart, or professional. It's just that we don't really have the necessary organizational systems to know what to do and how to respond to such a scenario.
According to Eric Toner, 150 million deaths in 20 months is the most optimistic scenario because:
a) the hypothetical Clade X had a very low virulence, inferior even to such completely controlled diseases as SARS.
b) the vaccine against the sample proposed to the laboratories was created very quickly
But if you imagine that there will be no samples of the virus right away, or that there will be some obscure samples, then a delay in the vaccine will lead to the death of 900 million people in 20 months.
If the scenario is made even more harsh and we imagine that the pathogen will be much more virulent than SARS, then the death rate will no longer be counted in millions, but in billions.
