The players were told to coordinate initial and ongoing responses and then a transition to post-crisis conditions. The game’s scenario involved a fictional nation of 21 million people hit by a rapidly spreading disease that can lead to respiratory failure and death. And in order to respond with time and speed, you have to have relationships and mechanisms in place to plug into.” “And I say that because, as one of the private-sector people in attendance, time and speed is absolutely No. “And it showed that over two days, we could work together. “The skill sets and the knowledge were just so diverse – everything from government agencies to the military and the private sector,” said Alexander Soukhanov, a maritime shipping agency executive who played the role of a civilian logistics company owner in the game. The other sponsors of the two-day event were the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences-National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, whose Laurel, Maryland, site hosted the gathering. But does it mean we’re a little smarter about the things we’re going to face if we do? Yes.” Does this mean we know whether or not to quarantine? Probably not. Other people said, you absolutely shouldn’t for this disease because it will be harder to find the infected,” Davies said. “We had people say that, naturally, we’re going to go into enforced mass quarantine. It was instructive to watch the interplay of arguments in the quarantine example, Davies said. While some players viewed forced mass quarantine as an obvious political reality, many medical professionals said that it could drive the infected underground and actually spread the disease faster. Some key findings were that nongovernmental organizations were willing to accept higher risk for their personnel than military commands and that local government and local authorities remained the primary agents for a successful response.Īnother finding focused on disagreement about the realities of quarantine. “Now we have a huge data set that allows us to really examine what the experts think they need to be effective in fighting a pandemic,” Davies said. “We brought some of the very best people who are currently responding to the coronavirus together to play out this scenario before it happened,” said Benjamin Davies, the game’s designer at the Naval War College. The lessons of that game, Urban Outbreak 19, now may be more important than ever, as the world’s governments struggle to slow the COVID-19 infection rate.
STRATEGIC NAVAL GAMES HOW TO
Naval War College co-sponsored a “war” game that looked at how to battle to a rapidly spreading infectious disease in a major urban area. In September 2019, months before COVID-19 became a household term, the U.S.