Samuel Brannen leads
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Risk and
Foresight Group and is a senior fellow in the International Security
Program.
Kathleen Hicks is CSIS senior vice president, Henry A. Kissinger Chair, and director of the International Security Program.
Kathleen Hicks is CSIS senior vice president, Henry A. Kissinger Chair, and director of the International Security Program.
The news of a highly contagious new virus jumping from
China to the U.S. has caught many Americans by surprise. For us, the
outbreak was more like déjà vu: Last October, we convened a group of
experts to work through what would happen if a global pandemic suddenly
hit the world’s population. The disease at the heart of our scenario was
a novel and highly transmissible coronavirus.
For our fictional pandemic, we assembled about 20 experts in global health, the biosciences, national security, emergency response and economics at our Washington, D.C., headquarters. The session was designed to stress-test U.S. approaches to global health challenges that could affect national security. As specialists in national security strategic planning, we’ve advised U.S. Cabinet officials, members of Congress, CEOs and other leaders on how to plan for crises before they strike, using realistic but fictional scenarios like this one.
The experts we convened walked through just how Americans and the global community would fare—how the pandemic would stress resources, bureaucracies and international relations. We then had participants backcast to today, recommending changes to our current path that could help avoid or manage the risks of a pandemic.
For our fictional pandemic, we assembled about 20 experts in global health, the biosciences, national security, emergency response and economics at our Washington, D.C., headquarters. The session was designed to stress-test U.S. approaches to global health challenges that could affect national security. As specialists in national security strategic planning, we’ve advised U.S. Cabinet officials, members of Congress, CEOs and other leaders on how to plan for crises before they strike, using realistic but fictional scenarios like this one.
The experts we convened walked through just how Americans and the global community would fare—how the pandemic would stress resources, bureaucracies and international relations. We then had participants backcast to today, recommending changes to our current path that could help avoid or manage the risks of a pandemic.
What we
found, overall, was that the world has changed in ways that make it far
harder to contain disease—and some of the mistakes that fuel its spread
have already happened in the current real-world outbreak. There is still
time, though, to think more carefully about how to respond both to this
outbreak and likely future ones.
We
chose a new strain of coronavirus for our scenario because scientists
agreed that this was a likely pathogen for a future epidemic; recent
outbreaks such as SARS and MERS were also caused by the coronavirus
family. The future we described was based on the research of deep
subject matter experts who have studied recent epidemics, including our
colleagues in the Center for Strategic and International Studies Global
Health Security program and researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security.
The parallels
between our exercise and today’s real outbreak aren’t exact. We assumed a
research laboratory-created virus first released in Europe (by accident
or intentionally—we left it deliberately unclear); the real-world
SARS-CoV-2 virus likely originated in wild animals sold at a meat market
and was first detected in Wuhan, China. But other aspects are extremely
similar: In our scenario, the virus was highly transmissible and had a
3.125 percent lethality rate. So far, the true rate of the new virus is
unknown, but according to the World Health Organization about 3.4
percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died.
So what happened, as our exercise unfolded—and what do Americans need to know about what might happen next?
The coronavirus in our scenario
spread much as today’s virus does, jumping between countries via
international air travel, causing problems not only for their health
systems, but for economies and political leaders.
The
fictional outbreak rapidly spread from its primary case at Berlin Tegel
Airport to a range of connecting international destinations. An
infected individual first transmitted the virus as he transited the
airport, then proceeded to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New
York, traveling to several additional destinations in the New York area,
where he continued to transmit the virus. In the three months since its
first human-to-human transmission at Tegel Airport, our virus spread
rapidly across Europe, North America, Northeast Asia and the Middle
East.
Our
scenario assumed governments would first turn to short-term measures to
try to slow the spread, such as travel bans and border closures. These
bans, we found, did little to slow the spread of the virus: By the time
those decisions got made, it had already started to spread through
international air corridors and further human-to-human transmission.
Like the real-world COVID-19 we are battling now, our hypothetical
disease was transmissible before carriers show serious symptoms, so
authorities—as now—found themselves playing catch-up.
Our
experts also projected that travel bans could have the unintended
effect of worsening international cooperation and disrupting trade. They
noted that travel bans are easy to enact, but difficult to repeal,
creating lasting friction in the movement of people that is central to
the U.S. services-led economy. In our scenario, we assumed that economic
activity had slowed substantially, due to the direct effects on worker health and government efforts
to prevent further spread of the virus. If anything, the real-world
disruption has sometimes exceeded our expectations, especially in the
case of the extraordinary quarantine measures imposed in China. In the
U.S., we assumed that life as normal would be on pause, as individuals
focused on their personal health and that of their families.
We
also assumed that nations would begin turning to fiscal and monetary
stimulus to calm markets and prop up growth—a response we’re already
seeing in the real world, such as the extraordinary decision on March 3
by the Federal Reserve Bank to cut its benchmark interest rate by a half
percentage point.
Our workshop
presented experts with a world coming to terms with a pandemic three
months after the initial outbreak. During that time, governments,
bio-research communities and drug manufacturers had raced to develop
treatments and a vaccine for this novel coronavirus, much as they are
today. But, given the long lead time for research and then human subject
testing, it would still take more than a year to come forward—exactly
the amount of time U.S. health officials are now forecasting a vaccine
for SARS-CoV-2 is likely to take.
We ended up with a handful of clear insights that we should heed in our current crisis, and to get ahead of the next one.
• One of our exercise’s most important insights is that early and preventative actions are critical.
Establishing trust and cooperation domestically and internationally
among governments, companies, workers and citizens is important before
crisis strikes. There has been some progress on this in recent years:
After the last crisis of the 2014-16 Ebola response, a range of
investments were made and initiatives undertaken in the United States,
within the World Health Organization, and elsewhere. In an era in which
Congress seems unable to agree on anything, global health security has
been a bright spot for bipartisanship—including $50 million allocated to
the CDC Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund, the passage of
the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act,
and the continuation of the Global Health Security Agenda. It’s not
enough according to public health experts, but it is a start.
• We also concluded that communication is vital—but a decline in trust makes it harder. Dramatic
shifts in the world also raised new alarm bells for health security in
our exercise. The first of these is the need for consistent messaging
and trusted sources of information. A critical ingredient for addressing
pandemics is public order and obedience to protocols, rationing, and
other measures that might be needed. Today, public trust in institutions
and leaders is fragile, with routine evidence of intentional
disinformation by foreign actors and elected officials alike.
Misstatements
about science are particularly damaging to the credibility of
scientists and health officials seeking to guide policy. One need look
no further than the anti-vaccination movement to see how disinformation
can effectively impair public health goals. And the broad-scale use by
state and nonstate actors alike of online disinformation to diminish
public confidence in governments and institutions is especially
dangerous in an already fragile crisis environment. Amid the
hyperpartisanship of the current U.S. political environment in a
presidential election year, coronavirus is a dangerously political
issue.
• International cooperation is also key. A
virus knows no borders, as we have already seen with the real-world
outbreak, and here a concerning change is heightened mistrust among
countries. In the midst of trade tensions, increased meddling by one
country in the internal politics of another and growing military
tensions in hot spots around the globe, organizations such as the World
Health Organization are increasingly caught in the middle, unable to
play their intended neutral function. States compete with one another
rather than cooperate, ignoring the inherently transnational nature of
the threat as they try to minimize the downsides to their own
populations, economies and ruling party. In our scenario, these
international tensions inhibited information sharing, much as we
initially saw from China with COVID-19. (Our scenario had an additional
complication: Because it wasn’t clear who exactly was behind the disease
outbreak, and whether it was accidental or intentional, the global
environment was even more charged.)
• Our exercise also underscored that the private sector will be vital to managing the outbreak.
There’s a good reason the president gathered pharmaceutical executives
on Monday. The U.S. federal government is rightly at the center of the
response to this likely pandemic, but it is the private sector that
holds the bulk of the technological innovation to producing treatments
and cures. One bit of good news on this front: There is already in place
a highly effective public-private partnership structure in the
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is making
important contributions in the current race for a vaccine.
The principal conclusion
of our scenario was that leaders simply don’t take health seriously
enough as a U.S. national security issue. Congress holds few hearings on
the topic, especially in the defense committees, and the White House
last year eliminated a top National Security Council position focused on
the issue.
There’s also weakness at the global level: Though there are bodies
dedicated to global coordination, especially the WHO, countries
prioritize domestic considerations in times of crisis, and international
coordination and collaboration become an afterthought. Even within the
European Union, countries make their own independent decisions in
responding to an epidemic. We already see rising frictions from border
closures and travel bans to export restrictions related to medicine.
Ours was not the first pandemic scenario to raise serious questions about the strength of the global health system. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has developed a particularly outstanding pandemic exercise, Clade X, a full video of which is available online.
These warnings have not been taken seriously enough. Overall, the U.S. government’s approach continues to suffer from a “cycle of crisis and complacency,” as the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security recently reported—meaning that leaders scramble to react to a headline epidemic, and then their attention drifts, hurting their ability to prevent the next one. Managing from crisis to crisis carries a staggering cost in lives and dollars.
In the real crisis unfolding now, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent—but little of that money will address underlying issues that will set in when the complacency strikes again. Overall economic costs to the global economy will range in the trillions. It’s in America’s interest to spend money on greater pandemic preparedness, not just in the U.S., but globally.
The fact that the real-world outbreak happened in China may actually have been lucky: China is the world’s second-largest economy, with a relatively advanced scientific base and uniquely top-down system of governance that gives it unusual ability to control and monitor its enormous population. Despite significant missteps at the outset, China has come to deal aggressively with this outbreak. The next pandemic is far likelier to emerge from a country or region that is poor, weakly governed and with weak public health infrastructure.
The coronavirus scenario we crafted was one of three designed to investigate the vital but rapidly changing role for government at the intersection of security and emerging technology. The other two focused on Chinese military employment of artificial intelligence and a major state cyberattack and large-scale disinformation campaign aimed at the United States. Across all the threat streams we examined, early detection, public and international trust and information sharing, and harnessing innovation in the private sector were vital to effective risk reduction. Policy, health and our very survival are within our control. Scenarios and foresight work can be powerful tools to imagine a possible future. But we must do better. We must make policy that prevents and, where needed, prepares for those futures we do not want.
Ours was not the first pandemic scenario to raise serious questions about the strength of the global health system. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has developed a particularly outstanding pandemic exercise, Clade X, a full video of which is available online.
These warnings have not been taken seriously enough. Overall, the U.S. government’s approach continues to suffer from a “cycle of crisis and complacency,” as the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security recently reported—meaning that leaders scramble to react to a headline epidemic, and then their attention drifts, hurting their ability to prevent the next one. Managing from crisis to crisis carries a staggering cost in lives and dollars.
In the real crisis unfolding now, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent—but little of that money will address underlying issues that will set in when the complacency strikes again. Overall economic costs to the global economy will range in the trillions. It’s in America’s interest to spend money on greater pandemic preparedness, not just in the U.S., but globally.
The fact that the real-world outbreak happened in China may actually have been lucky: China is the world’s second-largest economy, with a relatively advanced scientific base and uniquely top-down system of governance that gives it unusual ability to control and monitor its enormous population. Despite significant missteps at the outset, China has come to deal aggressively with this outbreak. The next pandemic is far likelier to emerge from a country or region that is poor, weakly governed and with weak public health infrastructure.
The coronavirus scenario we crafted was one of three designed to investigate the vital but rapidly changing role for government at the intersection of security and emerging technology. The other two focused on Chinese military employment of artificial intelligence and a major state cyberattack and large-scale disinformation campaign aimed at the United States. Across all the threat streams we examined, early detection, public and international trust and information sharing, and harnessing innovation in the private sector were vital to effective risk reduction. Policy, health and our very survival are within our control. Scenarios and foresight work can be powerful tools to imagine a possible future. But we must do better. We must make policy that prevents and, where needed, prepares for those futures we do not want.
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