pixabay
The coronavirus, not the Corona virus, was officially declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) this past Thursday, January 30th.
What that means is that the World Health Organization considers the coronavirus outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
It also means that the WHO is recommending health measures be implemented “to prevent or reduce the international spread of disease and avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic.”
As of Monday, the coronavirus has been deemed more deadly than severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) with over 17,400 people infected, 362 dead, and 11 confirmed cases in United States.
According to the Daily Express in their coverage of the coronavirus…
In October 2019, a joint collaboration between the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted an event called Event 201.
In the event, medical experts were asked to run a simulation which analysed the potential threat of a coronavirus – a group of viruses which include the likes of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
The simulation eerily mirrored the current outbreak, known as 2019-nCoV, with farmers in Brazil catching the virus from pigs.
The Event 201 website explained the simulation was “a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic.”
When the simulation was completed, “The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths.”
With the recent coronavirus outbreak, the team at Event 201 has since issued a statement.
“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. 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.”
So there you go. No worries. Right?
[protected-iframe id=”8f08926116f1f9fe8b3b76d51c637512-97886205-92827192″ info=”https://giphy.com/embed/XEo7YJHUeplXa” width=”640″ height=”330″ frameborder=”0″ class=”giphy-embed” allowfullscreen=””]