How did humankind fare in the simulation? Not well. The scenario ended after 18 months with 65 million people dead. The Event 201 website sums it up that state of the pandemic a year and a half in:
The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80–90% of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
In the weeks after the emergence of the coronavirus in Wuhan, event organizers were forced to answer questions about whether they predicted the current pandemic, and contend with a few conspiracy theories.
The exercise was not a prediction, organizers insist. “We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said in a statement. “Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”
Rather than serving as a predictive tool, organizers say the simulation was more about identifying opportunities to improve the response to a potential pandemic. To that end, they produced seven recommendations “to diminish the potential impact and consequences of pandemics.”