Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on new coronavirus tests on Capitol Hill on May 7.<\/p>\n

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Anna Moneymaker\/The New York Times via AP<\/p>\n

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Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who’s been in Congress nearly 40 years, took part in some of the earliest pandemic games, including McCown’s series. Through the Senate Agriculture Committee, he’s also helped shape U.S. responses to real outbreaks. When the coronavirus hit, he said, he recognized the severity right away. It was the big one he’d been dreading for years.<\/p>\n

“We worked on African swine fever \u2014 that’s H1N1 \u2014 and also the avian flu, and now we’re working very hard on COVID-19,” Roberts said. “So, yeah, this is not my first rodeo.”<\/p>\n

Roberts said each experience was instructive \u2013 and alarming. It became clear to him that the nation needed to prepare for a potentially catastrophic pandemic, whether caused by an act of bioterrorism or a virus transmitted from animals to humans.<\/p>\n

“From time to time, there were all these warnings, and we were trying to get the attention of all the intelligence agencies: Move this to the top of the line,” Roberts said. “I don’t know how many times I asked the CIA when I was the intel chairman.”<\/p>\n

The senator said he can’t divulge the CIA’s specific response, but he said the outbreak threat just never stuck as a national security priority. As Roberts put it: “You could never get it in the top 10.”<\/p>\n

The Pentagon’s McCown said there are lessons and limits to war games. No simulation can prevent a deadly new virus from snowballing into a pandemic. But she said there’s value in “creating that space for people to think through problems in a hypothetical set of circumstances.”<\/p>\n

Fourteen years after her first pandemic simulation, McCown said, the experience is coming in handy at work and at home.<\/p>\n

“When I’m Cloroxing my car keys and wiping down my doorknob and picking up delivery groceries and so forth,” she said, “I’m thinking through [the] big picture of why am I doing this, and, you know, not just the nuisance factor.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n