It starts on Black Friday, as shoppers storm high street stores in search of the next bargain. Little do they know that the hard-earned cash they’re spending carries something lethal.
Within hours, as consumers mingle and move across town and country, a highly contagious virus has infected millions of Americans in every city.
By the time symptoms of the virus manifest, it’s already too late to prevent the pandemic engulfing the nation. Panic ensues. Borders are closed. Streets, towns, whole cities are quarantined.
Caught off guard, the collapse of the US government commences. Critical public services—water, transport, electricity, food—breakdown, as supply-chains fall apart.
Could it happen?
Before you start hoarding baked beans in a makeshift backyard bunker, this scenario of rapid social collapse is not a prediction. It’s fiction: the brainchild of developer Ubisoft Massive, for their eagerly anticipated game Tom Clancy’s The Division.
Except, to make the scenario as plausible as possible, the developers drew on a wealth of scientific data. If a pandemic really did hit New York City, Tom Clancy’s The Division provides a surprisingly authentic representation of how it could play out.
Over the last few decades, scientific assessments of the risk of a pandemic have viewed the threat with increasing seriousness. And it’s now widely recognized that our societies are woefully unprepared.
What’s worse is that the risk is not from bio-terrorism—but from industrial civilization itself.
In 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a guide on pandemic preparedness, which warned: “The mounting risk of a worldwide influenza pandemic poses numerous potentially devastating consequences for critical infrastructure in the United States. A pandemic will likely reduce dramatically the number of available workers in all sectors, and significantly disrupt the movement of people and goods, which will threaten essential services and operations.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
