The Terrifying Lessons of a Pandemic Simulation
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
We don't hear about any of it, so we assume nothing is being done. But the reason it's kept secret is so that people don't start freaking out at scary tabloid headlines.
For example, there is a thing called "the black web" (different sectors have different names for it). Many U.S. government agencies have websites ready to launch in the event of a catastrophic calamity like a pandemic or a radiation leak that affects millions.
Source: Two people I worked with who worked on one of the projects.
Everyone referred you to the city's home page. The site buckled under the load, and was completely unresponsive for hours. If it was a more urgent emergency, the lack of information could have led to people being harmed.
I was hoping they would switch to a less dynamic site for alert pages, perhaps use a CDN or edge proxy like cloudflare, etc. But no, it appears demand just died off, and they are still doing the same thing. They just put out info on where you can go to national guard filling stations to fill up water bottles, and their home made .net based website is back to taking 10 seconds to render the home page.
The best part was the emergency phone alert they pushed out several hours late that didn't even have any information about what the emergency was, which resulted in 911 being flooded. Some jokes were made about the new hire from Hawaii...
No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else?
I knew all about HN, but no clue that we couldnt use water.
I can't stand Facebook, but it was better than nothing during the Northern California wildfires this last year, so I logged in and used it. The groups created by residents to track info were wonderful at first, but quickly descended into somewhat low utility after a day or tow as people regurgitated old information and misinformation every few hours, each time one level removed from the source and thus a bit harder for people to confirm or deny.
My wide uses nextdoor.com, and I've long thought I should take a look, but never gotten around to it. It would be interesting to see if Google can leverage their brand name to get enough people to sign up such that you could easily switch between multiple levels of locality, and also allow local news to leverage that in a way that preserves local reporting. If I could easily toggle between neighborhood, school district, city, state and region to find relevant information, and discussions, I would be pleasantly surprised.
Much better to just keep quiet about it.
I doubt a diagnosis would take more than a day, especially if the patient recently traveled or the hospital is near a major hub. Medical professionals are as obsessed with such diseases as we are.
Once the threat is known, I have no doubt that any decent medical system would contain it within a few days at the most. Ebola isn't the Sci-Fi threat you might think, requiring Biohazard suits etc. Basic precautions work well, finding possible contacts will be much easier, and the tendency of Americans not to attend mass events helps tremendously: Cars instead of public transport, Netflix instead of crowded bars, small families in suburban houses instead of large families in shared apartments, Wall-Mart instead of markets, etc
We now know this is not the default presentation of Ebola. In most patients, it's a serious febrile disease, not "Leaking blood from everywhere". The diagnostic process is much harder than you're giving credit for.
"I doubt a diagnosis would take more than a day, especially if the patient recently traveled or the hospital is near a major hub. Medical professionals are as obsessed with such diseases as we are."
The number of times travel histories are skipped or missed is staggering.
That being said, I worked in a group that was modeling both Ebola in West Africa and Ebola in the U.S., and the conclusion, even with some pretty serious scenarios, was that Ebola in U.S. would be pretty swiftly contained.
I wouldn't be stunned by a delay in response due to "it can't happen here" chauvinism, but once enough people were taking it seriously I would expect the US public health system to be up to the challenge. Hopefully there would be little or no delay in treating it seriously, I'm just pointing to that as a likely contributor to the size of a potential outbreak.
These all feed and overlap each other. Something can spread through the public school system's children quickly into parents, who take it into large shared office building environments (think typical complex of skyscrapers full of tenant companies sharing hallways, elevators, sidewalks, lunch spots, etc), and once a week completely different insersectional sets of these adults and children then gather up in a large church and disperse into the trifecta.
Hospitals themselves are another factor. Those with family ties end up randomly visiting hospitals a few times a year on average for their eldery relatives' or childrens' sakes, where they pick up a ton of chances at diseases.
How likely is it that current leaders heed their advice when an outbreak happens? Wouldn't it be more useful to have the people currently in power preparing for this?
Honestly asking - I have no idea about the modus operandi of Washington bureaucracy.
The most similar thing I know about personally is military contingency plans. My dad was a Marine Corps officer and, among other things, worked on contingency plans in the late 1960’s. There are standing contingency plans for almost every conceivable military operation the US might perform, ranging from amphibious landings on the fjords of Norway to capturing any given small Caribbean island. The plans don’t always get followed, though. My dad spent a lot of time developing a contingency plan to capture the island of Grenada, and he spent the rest of his life bitterly insisting that his plan was far better than how that operation actually turned out!
His main complaint was that the actual operation used an unnecessarily large cross-service force (largely for political reasons; the Air Force and Army didn't want to miss out on the chance to get involved) when his plan required less than a division of Marines with accompanying air support.
The contingency plans themselves are highly classified, and none of the plans nor the associated maps and whatnot are allowed to leave a specifically secured facility, making this one of the few times in his military career that my dad couldn't just take home his paperwork at the end of the day. In the case of the Grenada plan, there was already an existing plan that is reevaluated and updated with new intelligence, doctrine, etc. on a periodic basis.
One detail of the plan my dad mentioned investigating was a standing tank (i.e. a large barrel for storing liquids) in the middle of a field on the island. The old plan entailed securing the tank and using it as temporary fuel storage, but my dad was suspicious. It turns out the tank was in the middle of a sugar cane field. It was a molasses tank. Probably not safe or feasible for fuel storage.
Even writing this out, I find this story a little hard to believe, but that's the level of detail the military, at least, puts into their contingency plans.
I think it is simply he chooses not to understand in favor of gut instinct and even what he last read / saw on TV.
Like you said I don't want to go down the rabbit hole, but I think there's a difference between trying an unable and simply choosing not to try understand a thing (for whatever reason that is).
I am pretty sure it is lack of ability. Some of the reported interactions between him and other world leaders is pretty alarming. For example, Merkel of Germany had to tell him 11 times that he could not negotiate trade deals between the United States and Germany because Germany is part of the EU. (http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-trade-merkel-germany-eu...)
He uses his gut instinct all the time because that is all he has.
I mean, the guy can't even read.
GL HF with that. What really would have happened is that the government does what it always does: throw money at the problem. Every hospital gets x dollars to prepare or gets x dollars per confirmed diagnosis. Change like that never happens during a crisis, always after.
During the 2008 financial crises, the government did not nationalize the banks but it did "nationalize" how some of the banks did fail. Banks that could/would survive, were told to absorb banks that could not/would not survive with money that the government provided and dictated how much it would be paid back. Technically, not nationalization but pretty close.
I think sensible business people are also playful business people. And I think that any great development project, or any great engineering project, you can feel it, you can walk into the room and see people playing around, and you can see if they're acting seriously.
There was actually an interesting case, I don't think they would think of this as a game, but it was literally a game development story: Shell Oil.
Shell Oil -- in the 1980's, there was a time when the price of oil took a big dive, now Shell Oil it turns out was the only company that handled that situation well, and here's why:
Before then, oil was going up, up, up, and in order to be a good oil company you basically had to drill wells as fast as possible, increase production capacity as fast as possible, and pretty much all the oil companies were doing that. The strategic planners at Shell Oil realized that the price of oil might start going down, and that was bad news that no one in the oil industry wanted to do, nobody really wanted to believe it. So they thought about how to get these Shell Oil executives to actually pay attention to it, and they realized the only way they would actually pay attention to this idea was in the context of play.
So what they did is they basically built a simulation game of the oil industry, and they had the Shell Oil executives sit there in the game and put in their assumptions and play it out sort of like SimCity or something like that, of what oil prices would do, according to their assumptions. So they all played little roles, like one of them was an oil sheik, and another one was OPEC, another their competitive refineries, things like that, and they played out the consequences of various games. And one of the things that happened is in every one of their scenarios, the price of oil would crash. And everyone started laughing and they thought this was really silly, because of course everybody knew this wouldn't happen. But after they played this game a while, they started realizing that there were patterns that would happen. They were able to learn in the safety of a game what they really couldn't ever think in the danger of a real spreadsheet they were running the business with.
And in fact, that's what play lets people do. It lets them learn in safe situations things that are actually going to be useful in life. And in fact, in that particular example, Shell Oil realized from their playing that it was actually plausible that the price of oil would collapse, they took some steps to scale back some of their refineries and things like that, and they were the only major oil company that was actually in good shape when that happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut
[2] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr-Dan... (requires Flash. The whole talk is pretty good, and immediately preceding this bit is are funny anecdotes about Richard Feynman and Marvin Minsky)
The present administration isn't interested in preserving the status quo in the event of a pandemic. They are interested in preserving the whiteness of America. An epidemic that they can shape the response and resources around to cull the immigrant, native and slave-descended population would serve their supremacist vision.
4,600 are dead in Puerto Rico due to their negligence. [1]
4,600 is a conservative estimate.