Gates Package — page 927

alarm when they emerge, helping contain them, creating data systems to share case numbers and other information, standardizing policy recommendations and training, tracking the capacity to scale up tools (particularly diagnostics),, organizing drills to look for weak spots in the system, and so on. It should also coordinate the many professionals and systems around the globe who do this work at the country level. Creating this organization requires a serious commitment from rich-country governments, including making sure it is staffed properly. It will be hard to get the right consensus at the global level, as well as the right level of funding--but even knowing the obstacles, I feel it is a critical priority for the world to put this team in place. In this chapter I want to make clear how it should work. *** You might think a group like the one I'm proposing already exists. How many movies and TV shows have you seen where there's an outbreak of a scary disease and the world seems perfectly prepared? Someone starts showing symptoms. The president of the United States gets briefed on the situation with a dramatic animated computer model that shows the disease spreading worldwide. A team of experts get the phone call they've been waiting for (always during breakfast with their families, for some reason) and spring into action. Wearing hazmat suits and carrying expensive equipment, they are flown in on helicopters to assess the situation. They take a few samples, speed off to the lab, and go on to save humanity. Reality is a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, the Hollywood version underplays one of the most important (but admittedly undramatic) tasks in pandemic prevention: making sure that countries have strong health systems. In a well-run system, clinics are well