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For the record, African Swine Fever made top headline on BBC news for Africa today. (10JUN2020). https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-47639452
I was hired as a subject matter expert with incident command experience in a civilian setting by a leading US military provider (now owned by Raytheon) tasked to develop a 24/7/365 simulation gaming portal for the US military. The company was run by the two software engineers who had trained US armored brigade commanders for Desert Storm and the Battle of 73 Easting. When they took that experience down to the level of the desktop PC, they developed MAGTF, a game around the deployment of US Marine amphibious group task forces. The task on which I was to work emanated from DARPA and the US Department of Agriculture, and was backstopped by educational curricula developed by two other vendors, the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and was focused on an outbreak of the avian influenza inside Georgia’s huge chicken processing industry. [Six million birds….]
Working with what I had learned as a beta tester of a play by e-mail game developed with input from Thiagi as well as a few hours over dinner with a British developer of computerized simulation games who was attending the NASAGA conference in Montreal, the two lower echelon software engineers and I developed a “game engine” built on the development and assignment of 25 roles to five players. In other words, at any given time, each player had to wear one of five different hats. Using a timeline of two weeks compressed Into two hours, players inside their roles ascertained critical information by asking their co-players questions. The trick was that some of the “hats” were in conflict with other “hats”, including those worn by the same person.
The project was cancelled. We had a final meeting inside the triple-tight offices of the Crystal Palace. I was told, on the flight home, that the project had been cancelled due to financial improprieties on the part of one fo the other vendors. I doubted that. I overheard an angry comment made to my boss by his boss as I left the office building: “… I thought you vetted him.” Which led me to believe that my past co-authorship of the position paper for the Physicians for Social Responsibility on the Pentagon’s plan to handle collateral victims of a limited nuclear exchange in the Fulda Gap by shipping them to East Coast Hospitals (the CMCHS, or Civilian-Military Contingency Hospital System) had caught up with me. My experience is in mass casualty incident management. Victims of radiation require labor and fluids-intensive care not distantly unlike that which would be required by numbers of people suffering from respiratory failure due to ARDS from a virus.
So I went home and wrote this paper: http://www.iaem.com/documents/SimsandVCOPs1.pdf
I’m reminded of Avalon Hills “Civlization” where “Epidemic” was a card you traded one of your opponents and he loses a number of population, and that Player in turn can cause other players to lose population also. However the person who originally traded the card was immune.