Dark Winter is Coming

With COVID-19, I don’t think we will see an end anytime soon. This Coronavirus has disrupted our lives considerably. COVID-19 has brought illness and death. It has us facing a new Great Depression. People have lost their jobs, or had their jobs cut in half. Businesses are going bankrupt. A vaccine may not be in effect until the Spring of next year. The year 2020 has been disastrous and what is even more scary is that when the Dark Winter arrives for 2020, we may see a second wave of this virus. If you were lucky so far in not catching it on the first wave, you still have the second wave to face off with. With the second wave, we are looking at more deaths and the people that recover will at times acquire PTSD from their traumatic illness and recovery. I really hate to bring on the doom and gloom, but I really feel that the Dark Winter is coming.

In 2001, we did a practice run on how the United States would face head-on with a pandemic crisis.  The operation was called Operation Dark Winter.  Well, now it's not a practice run or a mock exercise, it's now reality.  To learn more about Operation Dark Winter, see below from Wikipedia:

Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.
Contents

Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely[citation needed] intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.

THE SCENARIO:
Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.

The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.

I am not sure what we learned from this exercise, but from the looks of things, it doesn't look like we learned much.  Unfortunately now, we must face the coming of the Dark Winter.  We must prepare ourselves.