The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.
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One 2015 DHS report, based partly on data produced by NISAC, warned that America’s public and private health systems might “experience significant shortages in vaccines, antivirals, pharmaceuticals needed to treat secondary infections and complications, personal protective equipment (PPE), and medical equipment, including ventilators.”
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Some of the predictions in the July 2015 DHS report were eerily prescient about the kinds of issues that the U.S. has faced in recent weeks because of the coronavirus; the report said that “a severe influenza pandemic could overwhelm the Healthcare and Public Health Sector in as little as 3-6 weeks” and warned that healthcare facilities in cities could be swamped.
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But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swathes of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.
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“Nobody even knew where any of the documents were anymore,” one of the former officials said. “It’s really just a source of frustration.”
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Officials are now scrambling to secure enough masks, respirators and ventilators to meet the rapidly exploding need. Doctors and nurses are reusing their protective gear as supplies dwindle; governors are begging the administration for federal help that has been slow to arrive.
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The DHS models were designed to look at the impacts of a pandemic on the different sectors within the department’s bailiwick, as well as other sectors that touched on homeland security. For instance, one report that NISAC worked on for a table-top exercise looked at how to combat a hypothetical epidemic in Southeast Asia, what travel restrictions to put in place, and how to design social distancing to stop the epidemic inside the United States.
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Juliette Kayyem, a senior DHS official in the Obama administration, praised the quality of the NISAC reports she received when she was at the department, and criticized DHS for being “singularly focused on border enforcement” under Trump at the expense of properly planning for other threats like a pandemic.
“We should not be surprised that a department that has for the last three and a half years viewed itself solely as a border enforcement agency seems ill-equipped to address a much greater threat to the homeland,” she said.
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The program’s costs were not inconsiderable: The government had to regularly purchase data sets to keep the models current, while also paying for coding, operations and maintenance, along with the original development costs. Between six and 10 people at Los Alamos were focused on pandemics and a total of 60 to 70 people at both DHS and the national labs had some role in the models, according to one of the former officials.
Politico
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