Gates Package — page 1059

2d with a full-scale simulation involving The Guardian revealed them during the scale outbreak exercise in Bali in 2008.5 Taiwan followed with a full-scale simulation involving the arrival of passenger with avian flu at the national airport. There have been none involving entire regions or the world. Although details are sometimes murky because governments classify some of the results--especially of full-scale exercises--it appears that the history of these simulations is spotty. On the positive side are countries like Taiwan and Vietnam, which have held frequent simulations at various levels of complexity, taken action to fix problems that were revealed, and set themselves up to respond especially well to COVID. But just as often, in other countries, these exercises end with a series of what-ifs and missed opportunities. For example, the United Kingdom ran an exercise called Winter Willow in 2007 and another, Cygnus, in 2016, both focused on flu outbreaks. Cygnus in particular highlighted problems with the government's readiness and produced a series of classified recommendations that went unheeded--and which caused a scandal when The Guardian revealed them during the first year of the COVID pandemic.6 The United States had a similar experience of its own. In 2019, the U.S. government ran Crimson Contagion, a series of exercises designed to answer one question: Was the country ready to respond to an outbreak of a novel flu virus from China?7 Overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, Crimson Contagion occurred in two phases. The first involved a series of seminars and tabletop exercises held Nordic countries ran simulations to test their readiness. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420921002119?via%3Dihub)