Event 201 and pandemic preparation

Event 201 was a tabletop exercise that simulated a global pandemic, which resulted from a new coronavirus. The program was hosted in October 2019 by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum.

The invite-only event featured medical professionals, policy experts and business analysts all focused on how different institutions would respond to the onset of a deadly virus. The fictional coronavirus — a coronavirus, in general, being a specific kind of virus — in the scenario killed 65 million people over 18 months. Joint recommendations from participants urged international cooperation both in preparing for and handling a pandemic.

The Center for Health Security has hosted three pandemic simulations prior to Event 201, going back to a 2001 simulation known as Dark Winter. The October simulation was the first time the center included private sector actors in its exercises, in the hopes of modeling how they might also react in such a crisis.

Host responds to prediction claim
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” the university program said in a statement rejecting the claim that it predicted the current pandemic. “We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people,” the center added.

The center further stated that the results of the scenario cannot be used to project for the COVID-19 outbreak because “the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”

The origins and severity of the fictional pandemic differ from the current outbreak, as do the reactions of national governments and civic institutions. The disease in the scenario was "modeled largely on SARS" according to recaps of the program.