Program Note: I am taking some personal time off this week, so for today and tomorrow we will continue our look back five years, to the very earliest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One interesting side-note is in order -- a memory from five years ago. After talking back then to a friend who had extensively reviewed the history of the Spanish Flu back during World War I, they were astonished at a number of parallels between what took place back then (all the efforts to fight the pandemic) and what was taking place during COVID. But one thing they mentioned hadn't happened yet -- a sort of vast amnesia that descended on the populace after it happened.

This is understandable enough, when you think about it. People tend to remember good things more than bad things. Happy memories are relived often, while unhappy memories are avoided or buried, for the most part.

But here we are, five years later, and the entire experience is fading from most people's memories. There is probably one exception to this general rule, and that is the children who had a large part of their childhood experience drastically changed -- what I later started calling "The COVID Generation." Kids who had missed out on senior year, or starting elementary school, or had to attend college remotely -- they'll have COVID as part of their formative years and the memories will likely be a lot stronger for them.

For the rest of us, reviewing the experience may not be high on anyone's list of things to do, but if you'd like to read some random thoughts, the New York Times has two articles today featuring people's thoughts (one from 29 different people and one from a columnist's perspective).

In any case, while reviewing what I had written five years ago, I came across the article below. It is wildly optimistic, in hoping that America would learn from our mistakes and plan accordingly for the future, I have to admit. The pandemic and the desperate responses to it became so politicized (for no real reason) and such a point of contention, that looking back on it now I'd have to say we would be even less prepared for another pandemic, at least in the near future. I say this no matter who would be president at the time. Just think if bird flu had leapt to humans a year ago and Joe Biden had been stuck with figuring out a response to it. Would he have closed schools and businesses? Probably not -- for fear of the political backlash. So I have to say, what I wrote back then makes perfect sense and was still what I would call sage advice, but sadly none of it happened and none of it likely ever will.

Originally published March 16, 2020

The administration of President Donald Trump is showing us all, in real time, how not to tackle a widespread medical crisis. Because things are moving so quickly, though, it's tough to tell how much of their woefully inadequate response has been the fault of Donald Trump himself, Trump's scorn for experts of any type who know more things than he does (a category which includes many people, for obvious reasons), or Trump's advisors and aides who have been put in charge of a massive problem but whose main worry seems to be not ever contradicting Trump in public (no matter how wrong Trump gets things). It all adds up to making a bad situation much worse, which is precisely where we find ourselves now. Decisions are made for political reasons, or -- worse -- to avoid making Trump himself look bad in any way. This has shattered the confidence of the stock market, as evidenced by today's record-busting 3,000-point drop. The more time goes by, the more Trump's inadequacies are becoming impossible to ignore, even by his staunchest supporters. Donald Trump, quite obviously, does not have a clue what to do next, is instead out there blatantly lying about the situation on a daily basis, and we're all going to suffer as a direct result. No wonder the market's tanking.

Last Friday, the market seemed to recover somewhat, as Trump finally (finally!) managed to sound presidential for 10 or 15 minutes in a press conference. Of course, the market closed before he actually took questions, but his scripted remarks were precisely what they should have been -- calming and showing some confidence, backed up by private-sector business leaders who were eager to help. The only problem was, the two big things that Trump promised would happen very soon were soon proved to be nothing more than two gigantic lies, once again. Trump distinctly said the new website for people who were experiencing symptoms would be up and running by "Sunday night." He also implied that drive-through testing would be widely available within days. Neither is remotely true. The company working on the website hastily issued a statement saying the website would definitely not be ready when Trump said it would, would initially only work for people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and no timeline was even given as to when it would be ramped up nationwide. One drive-through testing center opened in New Rochelle, New York, but few others have been set up, three days later.

Nowhere is it more evident how callous the lies coming from the Trump administration are than in the availability of testing. At the beginning of the month, Trump administration officials were promising "a million tests" would be available "by the end of the week." On March 4, Vice President Mike Pence swore they were ramping up to 1.5 million tests that week, and by the following week would be up to "4 million tests" made available to the public. By that Friday, March 6, only 500 people in the entire country had actually been tested, while Trump was telling the public that "everyone who wants a test can get tested." Yesterday -- more than a week later -- that number had only climbed to 13,000 people tested. By their original estimates, we were supposed to have 4 million tests by that point, but only 13,000 had been done. That's not just "missing our projections," that is outright lying or massive incompetence, take your pick.

How much of this miserable failure is the fault of Trump and his team of sycophants, and how much is the fault of the federal government in not making adequate plans for future pandemics? We'll likely have to wait a while to find out the answer to that. There could easily be a playbook sitting around some government office somewhere gathering dust that hasn't even been consulted yet, which could have dictated a much better response to the coronavirus. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that is the case, and the reason why it was never consulted was due to Trump having fired every single person who knew it even existed. Or, even worse, I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a playbook but Trump ordered everyone to ignore it because he thought the whole thing would just blow over like the flu and none of it would be necessary. At this point, virtually nothing the Trump administration does surprises me anymore, because I've become so numb to their ongoing parade of incompetence. Perhaps there was a playbook developed by the White House pandemic team that Trump fired two years ago, but Trump ordered it all deleted because "it came from Obama, therefore it must be worthless." Again, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

But, to be fair, it also wouldn't surprise me if that playbook simply never existed at all. It would shock me, to be sure, but it wouldn't surprise me much. The only part of the federal government who seems capable of long-term planning that covers all imaginable contingencies is the Pentagon. At least, that's been my experience throughout my life. Which is why the word "gaming" appears in this article's title.

At some point, we'll make it through the COVID-19 crisis. We as a nation will have learned a lot. So will the government. We'll all learn from mistakes made, and hopefully efforts will be launched to improve things when the next pandemic hits, drawing on all the lessons we're now learning.

But we really need to go further than that. We need to put protocols in place and draw up plans for all possible contingencies so that the next time around everyone will have a solid roadmap of what should happen and when. And the best way to do that is to game it out.

Those old enough to remember the Cold War know what the term "war games" means. There was even a movie of the same name, although it dealt more with a computer that seemingly took over our nuclear force (kind of a proto-Skynet, if you prefer Terminator metaphors). But rogue computers aside, the basic idea is pretty simple. Two groups of military generals and government officials are created, with each assigned a role (president, joint chiefs of staff, etc.). One team was put in charge of the Soviet Union, and the other was put in charge of the United States. Referees would pass between the two isolated groups and all the pieces on the "big board" were moved around. A war would break out, and then escalate. A situation would develop, which sometimes would turn into a nuclear exchange. Sometimes random events would be inserted by the referees ("Sorry, there's a category-4 hurricane in the North Atlantic, if you send your warships to Iceland, you'll probably lose a number of them to the storm"), just to keep things lively.

On one level, the whole thing sounds kind of silly -- because important officials were spending their valuable time essentially playing a gigantic game of Risk. These war games could last days at a time, and were entirely fictional. But that's missing the point of the exercise. There were two main goals from holding these war games: (1) to improve the Pentagon's playbook to include all possible contingencies about how the Soviets might attack, how we would respond, and what would happen next; and (2) to give the people involved some experience with the consequences of certain actions they decided to take. Will you launch a missile attack from American submarines at Moscow? Well, then, you just lost New York City and Washington D.C. to a retaliatory attack. Any government officials who were still in those two cities are now dead, so you've got to continue playing without them. Did you protect the presidential line of succession by moving some cabinet members to remote locations? Then the highest on the list is now acting president and will be giving the orders.

These war games would end with wildly different outcomes. Sometimes diplomacy worked and war was entirely avoided. Sometimes multiple nuclear exchanges took place, wiping out high percentages of the population of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Tens of millions of deaths are always a possibility when the nukes start flying. And the referees who set up the scenario always would try to show that sometimes random events beyond your control have major implications that the military hadn't yet considered. At the end of each war game, military planners would take any lessons learned and try to avoid pitfalls and adjust the nation's war plans accordingly. That's how the playbook was continually updated.

No matter how the coronavirus pandemic ends, the same approach is certainly worth considering in the future. Instead of playing war games, set up a "virus game" or "pandemic game" instead. Get governors and high-ranking government doctors and officials to participate. Get the appropriate military men involved (mostly National Guard leaders), but also try to get as many representatives of those who would need to leap into action in the same room as possible -- C.E.O.s of drug companies and testing-kit companies and website companies, major hospital administrators, state-level public health officials, major airport managers, as well as leaders of industries that might have to bear the weight of the response, such as airlines, restaurants, sports leagues, etc. Put them all in a closed room, assign them all roles to play, and game the whole thing out. Let them all see in stark detail the consequences of each action or inaction.

America regularly put in this effort to hone our plans for possible military conflict with the Soviet Union because it was rightly seen as an existential threat. Now, a pandemic is less of a threat (it'd be a stretch to call it "existential," since America will still be around afterwards no matter what develops, most likely), but it's still a pretty major threat to our country and our economy. As we all can now see, with every passing day.

Trump's response to the pandemic might be valuable one day as the best worst example. But sooner or later, COVID-19 will cease to be a threat and life will go on. Also sooner or later, Trump will no longer be in the White House and the government can get back to where expertise and intelligence are once again highly regarded in high-ranking officials. And at that point, the government should begin planning in earnest for the next pandemic. And "virus games" could be a valuable part of developing such plans.

The most striking thing about the bewilderingly insufficient response from the Trump administration so far has been its ad hoc nature. Things have happened with absolutely no guidance from the top. Trump obviously wasn't interested in displaying any sort of leadership whatsoever, so others stepped into the void. The major sports leagues decided -- on their own -- to suspend seasons and cancel championship playoffs. Governors -- independently -- decided to shut down schools and ban gatherings of large people. States got tired of waiting for the federal government to deliver test kits and developed tests of their own instead. Amusement parks decided to close their doors. Now, even presidential primaries are being postponed. But none of it -- none of it, mind you -- happened because of any guidance from the top. Trump didn't call for sports to take a hiatus. The Department of Education didn't issue guidelines to schools and universities about whether they should close or not. Neither did the Department of Health and Human Services. Today the Centers for Disease Control finally recommended that gatherings of 50 people or more be banned, but this was long after many governors had already done so. A website is grandly announced, but then it turns out it won't be ready any time soon. Drive-through testing is unveiled with much fanfare, but nobody really knows how it's going to work or where it will take place. Everything has been slap-dash and put together on the fly. This makes it painfully obvious that there simply is no pandemic playbook being followed. It either does not exist or it is being flat-out ignored, one or the other.

It shouldn't have to be like this. It shouldn't have to be like this now, but it damn sure shouldn't be like this in the future. The biggest lesson the federal government needs to learn from the disastrous response by Team Trump is that such plans must be put in place before the emergency hits. And the only way to develop such plans is to see how different actions and aggressive timelines might make a difference in the future. The next president should make it a priority, in fact. Let the "virus games" begin.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant