Covid War Games?

[Stone]

An incredible document the more one peruses it!

For example[from pages 83-84]:

The SPARS Scenario: An Introduction

Scenario Environment

The setting of SPARS is the world in 2025–2028 [or perhaps 2019-2022? - The Catacombs]. For this time period, the project team imagined a world that is simultaneously more connected and yet more divided. There is nearly universal access to wireless internet for even the poorest persons in the United States. Additionally, technological innovations and competition between technology companies have made an even wider range of information technology readily available to all. Despite the possibilities for these advancements to facilitate broad communication between individuals and communities, the project team also envisioned a future where many have chosen to self-restrict the sources they seek for information, often electing to interact  only with those whom they agree with on significant issues. This trend increasingly isolates cliques from one another, making communication across and between these groups more difficult.

In relation to MCM (medical counter-measures) communication more specifically, government agencies like the CDC have increasingly adopted social media technologies, including long-existing platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, as well as emerging platforms like ZapQ—an interface that enables users to aggregate and archive media content from other platforms and communicate with cloud-based social groups based on common interests and current events. Federal and state public health organizations have also developed agency-specific applications and ramped up efforts to maintain and update agency websites.

Challenging this technological grip, however, are the diversity of new platforms and the speed with which social media communities evolve. Moreover, while technologically savvy and capable, these agencies still lag in terms of their “multilingual” skills, cultural competence, and ability to be present on all forms of social media. These agencies also face budget constraints, which complicates their efforts to improve public communications efficiency and effectiveness by increasing their presence in existing and emerging social media platforms.


SPARS

After much consideration of possible emergency situations that would require MCM use, the project team decided on setting the storyline around a novel coronavirus that caused a mild, flu-like disease in most instances, but pneumonia and/or hypoxia requiring hospitalization and extensive medical treatment in a small minority of cases. The project team named this fictional pathogen the St. Paul Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, or SPARS for short, because in the scenario it is first identified in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Two features of this disease are important to note because they impact how the storyline of the scenario plays out, as well as some of the communication dilemmas that occur. First, the project team decided to make SPARS have an extended incubation period (7 to 10 days) but a short latent period (4 to 5 days). This complicates the scenario because infected persons in the story are capable of spreading the virus for up to 6 days before showing symptoms of the disease themselves. This feature of SPARS makes isolation procedures in the scenario, like urging people to stay home if  they think they might be sick, less effective than what is typically expected for airborne pathogens and thus introduces novel dilemmas in the storyline. Second, the project team decided to make the morbidity and mortality from SPARS both significantly higher in children than adults, and among pregnant women and those with chronic respiratory conditions. This parallels disease characteristics associated with past disease outbreaks, including the H1N1 pandemic, and allowed for some communication dilemmas from the past to be revisited under different future circumstances.