Posted on 03/19/2020 8:27:35 PM PDT by bitt
The Trump administration simulated the ability of the United States to handle a flulike pandemic months before the coronavirus turned the scenario into a reality.
The Health and Human Services Department led the exercise, known as the "Crimson Contagion," last year in conjunction with dozens of states and federal agencies, according to the New York Times. HHS also invited charitable groups, insurance companies, and major hospitals to take part in the effort.
Former Air Force physician Robert Kadlec, who has studied biodefense issues for decades, led the exercise, which imagined a contagious disease that originated in China and spread globally after nearly three dozen tourists were infected and returned home. The hypothetical outbreak spread quickly through the U.S. after an infected person attended a concert packed with thousands of others.
The exercise, which took place from January to August of last year, highlighted some of the problems that the federal government is struggling to handle now, such as insufficient hospital space and medical supplies, as well as confusion between federal agencies and between states and the federal government.
Trump has defended the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying on Thursday that his administration has handled the crisis well considering “nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
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Things can’t be all that bad if we have all this time for finger pointing.
So? In the world of international travel and emerging pathogens I would expect such drills.
Pandemic flu simulations and training of stakeholder groups has been going on for over a decade.
We would be in worse shape without without it.
The are simulator games on this topic that anyone can buy...
Those types of simulation exercises are run at least once a year. A lot of states, localities run similar mass casualty exercises.
The Wash Examiner thinks that this is a gotcha line.
In emergency management we ALWAYS drilled with a scenario that was 5-10 times worse than we really expected.
Hopefully this is NOT one of those worse-case worst-case events.
Personally I think it will run its course in a reasonable time if everyone relaxes just a bit
While such practice drills are often overdone make work exercises for redundant civil servants , they can occasionally prove quite useful. As , it appears,. This drill may have been
It is my understanding that is absolutely false and is fake news.
By the way, exercises like this are never like the real thing. They are models, and they can help identify some short-comings, but will always lack detail because the only way to get detail is from the real thing. Think chaos theory.
How can this be? I thought Trump cut all funding for the pandemic office.
The media can’t keep their lies straight.
Isn’t that their job? Can’t win with these guys, but I knew that.
By the way, exercises like this are never like the real thing. They are models, and they can help identify some short-comings, but will always lack detail because the only way to get detail is from the real thing. Think chaos theory.
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As someone who has participated in a number of similar exercises (Continuity of Operations) they frequently are little more than filling in forms with standard boilerplate.
Going back to 2004, the Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, the “perfect pandemic” terrified the world and national health agencies. Early scientific estimates from the WHO of mortality went as high as 1 billion people, which was overruled by their political leaders.
Even though almost every nation, including North Korea, was on board to fight it, the effort was horribly disorganized. Only by sheer luck was the “thermonuclear flu” avoided, at least for a time.
Then when the H1N1 influenza became a “killer flu” and hit Ukraine, it again rattled all the medical cages about how incapable we were to deal with it.
Similar concerns came about because of the SARS and MERS and ebola outbreaks.
This is why behind the scenes our public health system has been in overdrive to plan for the next pandemic.
This is not to say they or anyone else schemed to cause such a disaster, but at some point they figured that a natural epidemic would happen, so what better opportunity to have a national and international “dress rehearsal” for the real thing?
Nothing nefarious in it at all, but it is not something that can be done at a smaller scale. The entire nation and world have to come along just to see that we can do it.
War Gaming, so what?
IMPEACH TRUMP! (again) /s
“Pandemic flu simulations and training of stakeholder groups has been going on for over a decade.”
Yep. I participated in several in the mid 2000s.
L
With hindsight of SARS, Ebola and MERS, it would be stupid to not run simulations and plan for yet another corona visitation.
Schools have “active shooter” drills/training does that mean one of schools is planning to have such a real event? No!
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