Event 201 pandemic exercise

[_Only]

This is the first I heard of this exercise that was held in NY city just about 4 months ago held to prepare for a hypothetical pandemic. Has anyone else heard anything about this, and/or has some more info than what's shown on this website? It's really interesting, and I'm not sure why we haven't heard about this (or maybe others have and I missed the info). It's at the least coincidentally compelling that just 4 months later a pandemic hits and NY became the biggest state hit in the country.

http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/about

[+Not A Rockstar]

In and of itself, it seems just a coincidence, but, when you realize there was an event shortly before 9/11 and also one or more of the school shootings, it starts making you wonder.

There is some talk along these lines in the conspiracy circles, but,  I don't bother discussing that here.

If you follow that rabbit trail you will soon run into Agenda 21 and maybe some of the Q material and related ideas running rampant right now. It all seems pretty far fetched until you spend a day watching the propaganda the Media is pushing. Then, it becomes a toss-up as to what, exactly, is crazy after all.

[+and-then]

I recently began a new novel series by Bobby Akart.  He describes a terrorist bioweapon pandemic that uses a antibiotic resistant form of pneumonic plague (Yersinia Pestis bacterium) and as it unfolds it has been eerie just how much of his plot points are in the news today.

[_Only]

Yeah, the weird part to me, though, besides the coincidence it was held 4 months ago, is that I don't know of many hearing about this, when it seems it would be considerably news worthy in that we're now dealing with exactly what they exercised about. And all these experts are saying how we had no preparation at all for this; were they not informed about this event? Even after the fact?

[Piney]

36 minutes ago, and then said:

(Yersinia Pestis bacterium) 

Is first found among the Proto-Indo Europeans and was probably the reason for the Neolithic decline when they carried it into Europe.

That b***** has been haunting us since the domestication of the cow and horse and just may evolve antibiotic resistance all by it's lonesome. 

[aztek]

i live and work in nyc, never seen or heard anything in relation to event 201. never heard anyone talk, or mentioning it

Edited April 4, 2020 by aztek

[Imaginarynumber1]

There are constant preparedness drills like these. Nothing sneaky or sinister about it, 

[+Not A Rockstar]

70% of the news right now is about OMG CORONA panic, and undermining public confidence in government. The other 30 is generic related randomness. 

You will not hear about this from the Media because it does not feed into the story line and if you try to ask very loudly the Conspiracy Police alert and will shout down anything at all you wish to ask as complete idiocy. If you want truth you have to look for it and decide for yourself and basically not give a damn about what anyone else thinks.

[XenoFish]

I kinda think corona/ covid-19 was let loose to stop the hong kong riots. I suppose that makes me a conspiracy nutter, but this whole thing feels off to me. 

[aztek]

i think c19 is just the beginning of new world order,  first the sickness, then loss of crops,  then infrastructure failure,  then civil disobedience, riots, rampant crime,  martial laws, fall of society, ...etc, i'd love to be wrong, thou. 

[_Only]

1 hour ago, Imaginarynumber1 said:

Nothing sneaky or sinister about it, 

No one implied that here. 

edit: Well, then I see comment above mine, but to be fair, that was after the fact, heh.

Edited April 5, 2020 by _Only

[Imaginarynumber1]

1 minute ago, _Only said:

No one implied that here. 

edit: Well, then I see comment above mine, but to be fair, that was after the fact, heh.

You know how easily things get out of hand here. It was only a matter of time.

[_Only]

2 hours ago, Not A Rockstar said:

Then, it becomes a toss-up as to what, exactly, is crazy after all.

Everything, seemingly, these days.

What I find really confusing is how Bill & Melinda Foundation is holding hands with U.S. government in potentially pushing the wristband thing - yet no discussion about the virus war game exercises they just had that they were involved in? 

I guess maybe just a lot gets talked about that isn't expressed publicly. That's a damn shame in this scenario, though.

[Peter B]

51 minutes ago, Imaginarynumber1 said:

There are constant preparedness drills like these. Nothing sneaky or sinister about it, 

This. ^

My wife was part of a team which planned for how Australia might deal with a pandemic when bird flu was a concern back in about 2008. She likes to think that some of the plans they came up with might have been dusted off and at least reviewed by those involved in planning at the moment.

And the current head of the Treasury here in Australia (that is, the senior public servant), Steven Kennedy, co-wrote a paper back in 2006 which discussed how to manage the economy through a pandemic (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-03/coronavirus-morrison-ends-partisan-politics/12117318?section=analysis).

In other words, there are people around the world who do actually think about unlikely situations and come up with possible solutions to the problems those situations might cause. The proposed solutions may not always be suitable or practical, because the actual situation probably won't match the hypothesised situation, but the proposed solutions can provide the basis for discussion and be adapted, rather than having people have to start developing solutions from scratch. For example, Kennedy's article was based around a flu pandemic, which would probably have behaved differently from the current pandemic.

It's the same reason military and police undertake training - so they know how to deal with situations when they arise and have some sort of plan they can adapt when what's on the shelf doesn't exactly match the actual situation. 

[_Only]

That's fine, but I'm wondering how everyone around the world trained in dealing with this stuff is saying we were blindsided. There was clearly, just months ago, a concerted plan to bring experts from the world together to prepare for a situation exactly as this. I'm not saying the whole world should have known about these exercises, but at least some should be mentioning it as a potential source of preparedness.

Edited April 5, 2020 by _Only

[aztek]

1 minute ago, _Only said:

That's fine; but I'm wondering how everyone around the world trained in dealing with this stuff is saying we were blindsided. There was clearly, just months ago, a concerted plan to bring experts from the world together to prepare for a situation exactly as this. 

it probably mostly happened on paper,  contingency plans, protocols, maybe some training for critical staff,  cuz nothing happened on the streets of nyc 4 months ago,  nothing that ordinary people  would notice 

[Imaginarynumber1]

1 hour ago, _Only said:

Yeah, the weird part to me, though, besides the coincidence it was held 4 months ago, is that I don't know of many hearing about this, when it seems it would be considerably news worthy in that we're now dealing with exactly what they exercised about. And all these experts are saying how we had no preparation at all for this; were they not informed about this event? Even after the fact?

I mean, there are a lot of articles about it. 

(OCT 19) https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/10/live-simulation-exercise-to-prepare-public-and-private-leaders-for-pandemic-response/

(OCT 19) https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/johns-hopkins-hosts-pandemic-simulation.html

(NOV 19) https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/11/06/event-201-health-security/

(JAN 20) https://futurism.com/neoscope/recent-simulation-coronavirus-killed-65-million-people

The result was that we are not at all prepared. Turns out that is very true.

[Imaginarynumber1]

5 minutes ago, _Only said:

That's fine, but I'm wondering how everyone around the world trained in dealing with this stuff is saying we were blindsided. There was clearly, just months ago, a concerted plan to bring experts from the world together to prepare for a situation exactly as this. I'm not saying the whole world should have known about these exercises, but at least some should be mentioning it as a potential source of preparedness.

It was 15 people around a table. 

Quote

The simulation challenged 15 leaders with backgrounds in business, government and public health to address realistic economic and policy issues involving disease pandemics. 

 

[_Only]

I know. But involving some influential/important names, a dream team of sorts of those who should be involved, a big name one being the Gates' Foundation (not a part of team in the game of course, but helping fund/back this exercise), who is now actively interacting with the U.S. government in pushing ideas/products about this issue. I think Not A Rockstar might have the most potent answer, that the media isn't interested in promoting it in lieu of other things, and maybe some of these experts I hear speaking/being interviewed don't have all the info in the world, and/or didn't learn as much as would be expected, as you said. But if the latter, they definitely would (or at least should) be mentioning it.

Edited April 5, 2020 by _Only

[Peter B]

7 minutes ago, _Only said:

That's fine, but I'm wondering how everyone around the world trained in dealing with this stuff is saying we were blindsided. There was clearly, just months ago, a concerted plan to bring experts from the world together to prepare for a situation exactly as this. I'm not saying the whole world should have known about these exercises, but at least some should be mentioning it as a potential source of preparedness.

Here's another article about the exercise, from a time in pre-history we barely remember (1 February): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-01/coronavirus-outbreak-researchers-simulated-severe-pandemic/11906562

It's interesting to read the article in the context of the time it was written - when there were only a small number of cases outside China and virtually no restrictions outside China. Two things come to mind for me when I read the article. First is the lack of knowledge about the coronavirus at the time, making it hard to know what was an appropriately proportional response. Second is a degree of complacency which probably comes from an almost complete lack of awareness at the time that we were standing on the edge of an abyss.

And just regarding the first point, there's a thread somewhere else in the COVID-19 section of the forum which quotes a Facebook post by Canadian doctor Abdu Sharkawy dated about 8 February (so a week after the article I quoted above). He wrote: "I am scared that travel restrictions will become so far reaching that weddings will be canceled, graduations missed and family reunions will not materialize. And well, even that big party called the Olympic Games...that could be kyboshed too. Can you even imagine...The fact is the virus itself will not likely do much harm when it arrives."

So if a doctor specialising in infectious diseases could be blindsided by the pandemic, it's perhaps not unreasonable to believe that a large number of politicians, senior public servants and senior health officials could be blindsided too.

And another thought about proportional responses: even now we have people bemoaning the scale of restrictions on our normal lives (oh, hi there tmcom!), even as the number of infections around the world passes the 1.2 million mark (and a senior health official here in Australia reckons the actual number could be 5 or 10 times higher) and more than 60,000 people have died, and US government officials are saying that at least 100,000 will die in the USA even if everyone stays at home.

[_Only]

39 minutes ago, Peter B said:

 

So if a doctor specialising in infectious diseases could be blindsided by the pandemic, it's perhaps not unreasonable to believe that a large number of politicians, senior public servants and senior health officials could be blindsided too.

 

Yeah, that's actually the experts I was referring to, PhD's whose jobs are to study and work with pandemic viruses and the surrounding issues. It's these that I find so interesting to say we weren't prepared, much more than politicians or public servants, who would be expected to not be very knowledgeable about these things even if exercises were being held to work out how to deal with these issues, though if these foundations are organizing these groups of various important experts in their various fields, you'd at least tend to assume those field experts would be sharing pertinent information with others in their field, but there's always the possibility the exercises held didn't come up with as much helpful points/ideas as one would expect them to which could help here, but there had to be something that could have been used here, I'd think. 

Quote

infections around the world passes the 1.2 million mark (and a senior health official here in Australia reckons the actual number could be 5 or 10 times higher) and more than 60,000 people have died

Right, but that being an extremely small percentage of over 7.5 billion population should at least come into consideration when realizing this is basically stopping the world in its tracks right now. I'm not putting any weight on one hand or other whether or not reactions are justified or not; just acknowledging that there are 2 sides to see the world reaction here, and I can see how either side would feel strongly looking at other side and comparing their proportional stances and their effects on the other side of the coin.

Edited April 5, 2020 by _Only

[SHaYap]

Key word - asymptomatic 

Quote

https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki

Asymptomatic - Wikipedia

In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if a patient is a carrier for a disease or infection ... Some diseases are defined only clinically, like AIDS ...

 

https://www.sciencealert.com › ...

It's Estimated 1 in 4 Coronavirus Carriers Could Be Asymptomatic. Here's What ...

1 day ago · "That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East ... "The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be ...

 

https://www.nytimes.com › health

Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders - The New York ...

4 days ago · Their definition left out mild and asymptomatic cases and, as a result, the team vastly underestimated the ..

Nobody expected that pair of pocket rockets... 

~

[Imaginarynumber1]

1 hour ago, _Only said:

Right, but that being an extremely small percentage of over 7.5 billion population should at least come into consideration when realizing this is basically stopping the world in its tracks right now. 

1224 people died today in teh US alone. In a weeks time, maybe a little longer, 3000+ a day will be dying. That's roughly a 9/11's worth of deaths a day. that "extremely small percentage" is going to take a heavy toll. 

[Peter B]

2 hours ago, _Only said:

Yeah, that's actually the experts I was referring to, PhD's whose jobs are to study and work with pandemic viruses and the surrounding issues. It's these that I find so interesting to say we weren't prepared, much more than politicians or public servants, who would be expected to not be very knowledgeable about these things even if exercises were being held to work out how to deal with these issues, though if these foundations are organizing these groups of various important experts in their various fields, you'd at least tend to assume those field experts would be sharing pertinent information with others in their field, but there's always the possibility the exercises held didn't come up with as much helpful points/ideas as one would expect them to which could help here, but there had to be something that could have been used here, I'd think. 

Right, but that being an extremely small percentage of over 7.5 billion population should at least come into consideration when realizing this is basically stopping the world in its tracks right now. I'm not putting any weight on one hand or other whether or not reactions are justified or not; just acknowledging that there are 2 sides to see the world reaction here, and I can see how either side would feel strongly looking at other side and comparing their proportional stances and their effects on the other side of the coin.

"Interesting to say we weren't prepared": Fair point. I think the thing is that there are few professions in the world where any decent proportion of its membership is both trained and mentally prepared for worst-case scenarios to happen to them. Airline pilots are one example who come to mind, where pilots are constantly training on simulators to deal with all sorts of unusual scenarios. But when it comes to pandemics, many doctors are facing something the West hasn't faced in literally a century. Some commentators have pointed out that countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have dealt much more successfully with the current pandemic because of their experiences with SARS and MERS in the last 20-odd years.

"An extremely small percentage of the population...should at least come into consideration": Again a fair point, but one which has been addressed in the last month or so with the "flatten the curve" slogan. For one thing, the number of cases in the USA is currently showing little sign of slowing down, and there's a lot of largely unaffected territory available for the virus to appear in. Likewise, the virus is only just starting to spread through poorer countries with much less developed health systems. In other words, expect the number of cases and deaths to massively increase in the next month. For another thing, if countries effectively ignore the existence of the virus and attempt to go about their business normally, the death rate is going to massively increase. The whole basis of the "flatten the curve" concept is to spread the infections over a longer period of time. This way the number of people requiring hospitalisation or ICU beds at any one time remains within the capacity of each location. Once the ICU beds are full, people will die who could otherwise have lived, and so the death rate will increase - from "those who couldn't be saved even with a ventilator" to "those who could have been saved if there'd been a ventilator". My (completely amateur) guess is that if this happens, the mortality rate will quadruple. And that would have an economic effect all of its own which I suspect would be much greater than the effects of current attempts at a lockdown would have.

ETA: To put this in real-life context, my understanding is that New York will hit its limit (either of ICU beds or ventilators, I'm not sure which) within the next few days. Watch what happens there to get an idea of what might happen in the rest of the USA if you think it's worth considering just getting on with work.

Likewise, doctors in Australia have been asking medical ethicists to draw up guidelines to help them decide how to allocate ventilators if there's a shortage. They want guidelines to ease the moral and psychological burden of having to choose who lives and who dies in such circumstances.

Edited April 5, 2020 by Peter B

[+and-then]

6 hours ago, _Only said:

I'm not saying the whole world should have known about these exercises, but at least some should be mentioning it as a potential source of preparedness.

The same OMG crowd are firmly convinced that the Feds are supposed to be able to supply the needs of over 300 million citizens all over the nation...AT THE SAME TIME, no matter what their need happens to be.  THAT is childishness, IMO.