There was in fact an exercise (called “Event 201”) that took place in October that was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security — which the Gates Foundation participated in — that focused on emergency preparedness in the event of a “very severe pandemic.” But it didn’t deal with 2019-nCoV, and it didn’t make real-life predictions about death tolls.
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction,” the center said in a statement. “Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”
In other words, the event centered on a made-up coronavirus — and not one with the same features of the virus currently spreading. The fictionalized scenario involved a disease starting in pig farms in Brazil and spreading around the world, leading to 65 million deaths. Again, that was all made up for the simulation. Videos of, and information on, the event are easily accessible online; the Center for Health Security has hosted similar events in the past, too.
