If you read through the Red Dawn email chain NYT pieced together through FOIA requests [1], which gives an overview of initial professional thinking (January /

If you read through the Red Dawn email chain NYT pieced together through FOIA requests [1], which gives an overview of initial professional thinking (January / February), there's a great insight in the first few emails. No other emergency grows exponentially. Nuclear detonation, dirty bomb, power outage, hurricane, tainted food, etc. At worst they grow linearly at a high rate. Consequently, highly contagious pandemic response must be fundamentally unlike any other response. There are references to this bearing out in their prior wargaming of scenarios. All players (mistakenly) escalated linearly based on intuition. When in reality you're talking about needing 10x resources every week, ceteris paribus. [1] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6879-2020-covid-19-red-dawn-rising/66f590d5cd41e11bea0f/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6879-2020-covid-19-r...