Eric Toner has been planning for a pandemic for years. He's briefed world leaders on outbreaks and how to best prepare entire nations for mass casualties. He's simulated epidemics in real time and studied the world's response to major global health emergencies like SARS and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
But nothing could've prepared him for how the COVID-19 pandemic would play out.
Toner is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a world leader in pandemic preparedness. The threat of a novel coronavirus is not new to him. In fact, in October 2019, Toner and the team at Johns Hopkins ran a coronavirus pandemic simulation in New York, months before COVID-19 started spreading across the world. As part of the half-day, tabletop exercise, Toner met with other health professionals to walk through a theoretical coronavirus outbreak and examine how governments and private businesses would respond.
Johns Hopkins has run these simulations for years, with Hollywood-sounding code names like Dark Winter (smallpox) and Clade X ("a biologically-engineered, intentionally-released airborne pathogen" which caused hundreds of millions of hypothetical deaths). The goal of the simulations is to help public health experts and policymakers better prepare for the eventual day a real pandemic arrives.
Now that day has come.
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