Gates Package — page 1066

mething like this for pandemic prevention. passengers and crew members experiences hydraulic problems and crashes into a hotel a mile from the airport. The exercise involved 600 volunteers pretending to be victims, 400 first responders, and staff from sixteen hospitals, and it took place in a training facility with three aircraft and a fourstory building designed to let firefighters practice on real fire. Officials had to establish who was in command. First responders had to triage patients, treat the ones they could, and transport others to the hospital. Security had to manage a crowd of observers. Friends and family of the victims had to be notified. News reporters needed updates. The exercise identified some necessary improvements and cost about $100,000. At the other end of the complexity spectrum, there's the full-scale exercise run by U.S. military forces in August 2021.10 Over the course of two weeks, personnel from the Navy and Marine Corps participated in the largest naval training event in a generation. The name of this exercise--Large-Scale Exercise 2021--understated its scope. Simulating concurrent wars with two world powers, LSE 2021 spanned seventeen time zones and involved more than 25,000 personnel, using virtual reality to allow participants to join remotely and to link units from around the world so they could share information in real time. The analogy between war games and germ games is not perfect. Stopping an outbreak, after all, is different from fighting a war. Countries should be working together, not against one another. And unlike military exercises, outbreak simulations can involve the public and be highly visible so they're no more out-of-the-ordinary than a fire drill. Still, the ambition of the LSE is impressive. The exercise created the opportunity for organizations spread around the world to share data and make fast, informed decisions together. It is hard to read about that and not think: We need something like this for pandemic prevention.