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Yiji Suk

Event 201: A simulation that had foreseen the prevalence of COVID-19

Since the reporting of patient zero in China on 31 December 2019, the disease has spread throughout the whole world. On 12 March of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the novel coronavirus as a pandemic, meaning COVID-19 was now a global epidemic. Currently, the exponentially increasing number of global infections are almost impossible to control.


Event 201, an international consortium hosted by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the Economic World Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was held on 18 October of 2019. Overall, the event illustrated the social and economic consequences caused by the outbreak of a severe pandemic through a simulation.

The simulation was run with the outbreak of the novel zoonotic coronavirus that was transmitted from bats to pigs. The disease started in pig farms of Brazil, a country with a high population density and poverty rate. It spread quietly and slowly at first, but then started spreading rapidly. The virus first began spreading through the low-income population of South America, where people live in densely packed neighbourhoods such as favelas. Now an epidemic, the virus is then exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, China, and then to many other countries.


At first, some countries can deal with the situation. But this doesn't last long. Eventually, no country can maintain control. Development in vaccines usually take more than a year — even during emergency circumstances. The cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. The economy and society undergo severe consequences due to it.

The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic will continue until there’s an effective vaccine or until 80 to 90% of the global population has been infected. The rate in increment will fall due to the decreasing number of less susceptible people. From that point on, it’s likely to be an endemic childhood disease.


Although it's a simulation, fundamental elements of it share similar data with the current situation of the coronavirus pandemic. Some are even worse than the predictions in the scenario. Wuhan city has a higher population density than Brazil, and the coronavirus event happened during the Chinese New Year season when many people were traveling abroad. This led to a pandemic within two months, whereas the simulation predicted it to be about six months. Currently, the cumulative number of infection cases increases 10 times every two weeks. Vaccinations are in progress, but they just recently reached primary clinic trials, which tells us that the coronavirus situation will not be over in a short amount of time.

In this current situation, it’s hard to predict what will happen in the future. Amidst these hard times, everyone must be responsible for taking care of their personal hygiene, being aware of social distancing, and carrying out self-quarantine sensibly: this is the least we can do.


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