Attachment

"ence worked well, they found many more that did not. I'll mention just a few, which will sound eerily familiar. No one in the exercise understood what the federal government was responsible for, versus what others would do. The Department of Health and Human Services didn't have clear authority to lead the federal response. There wasn't enough money to buy vaccines (in this scenario, there was already an available vaccine for the strain in question, but it hadn't been administered). State leaders didn't know where to turn for accurate information. There were huge discrepancies in how states planned to deploy scarce resources, such as ventilators, and some had no plan at all. Some of the troubles were almost comically mundane, like something out of the TV show Veep. Federal agencies confused participants by unpredictably changing the names of conference calls. Sometimes the name of the meeting used some unrecognizable acronym, so people wouldn't show up. State governments, already understaffed, struggled to keep up with all the calls while also handling the response itself. It is telling that in the official government report on the results of Crimson Contagion-- dated January 2020, just as COVID cases were starting to mount--the word "diagnostics" appears only three times over fifty-nine pages. The report simply notes that diagnostics will be one of many supplies that will be hard to come by in a pandemic. Just a few weeks later, of course, the United States' inability to ramp up testing in a serious way would become tragically apparent. It bears repeating: America's failure to test people at anything near the scale that other nations achieved is the biggest mistake any country has made during the pandemic. Crimson Contagion was not the first simulation designed to test America's readiness to handle an outbreak. That honor likely goes to a tabletop exercise with the ominous name Dark