germ war games

In 2015 Bill Gates gave a TED talk in which he argued that the war we had to fear in the future was the one waged on us by some microbe for which we were utterly unprepared. He proposed that we should be conducting germ war games in which we improved our approach to such an attack. This was in response to the Ebola outbreak. The last time anything like this was done, he claimed, was in 2000 and the germs won, the humans lost.

 We have played around with the idea in computer games and in movies like Contagion, but we have not seriously attempted to come to grips with the notion that we should be prepared for a pandemic in real life. Enter COVID-19 and we are seriously unprepared.