On a Friday morning in October, about 100 high school and college students gathered in a Utah ballroom to play a game. Some students were assigned specific roles and given costumes to wear. “Government officials” slung ties over their T-shirts; “store clerks” sported aprons; and a trio of “journalists” wore fedoras and carried fake microphones.
Kambree Carlile, 16, played a “health care worker” and was given full protective gear to wear, including goggles and gloves. As students started getting “sick” with a mysterious and deadly pathogen, panic surged, Carlile says. “It wasn’t a real scenario, but people still got very frantic,” she says.
00:05I went to Utah to watch about a hundred students play a game called Operation Outbreak.
00:11Myalgia.
00:12Myalgia, okay.
00:13Sore throat.
00:14Creators of the game say that the game is like a fire drill, except instead of preparing kids for fires,
00:21they help prepare kids for infectious disease outbreaks.
00:25The game uses an app that alerts students if they've been infected.
00:30The objective of the game is to figure out what the pathogen is,
00:34and also to keep as many people alive and healthy as possible.
00:39Some students are assigned roles, like journalists.
00:43It was hard sometimes because, like, we got misinformation.
00:48So it was just, we were slow to get around to people.
00:51For a while, we just weren't quarantining people because the government hadn't, like, told us to quarantine people.
00:56We got sort of poor at one point, so we had to, like, charge more money for, like, the vaccines.
01:01Game organizers told me that since the COVID pandemic, many simulations have shown a deepening mistrust of government officials, journalists, and scientists.
01:13At some schools, they've seen complete societal breakdown, anarchy, total chaos, even malicious forming.
01:21Public health experts say that pandemics are only going to become more frequent and also become more deadly.
01:28But a game like this could help.
01:30Organizers say that students who play the game seem to gain more understanding about how to control outbreaks.
01:36There's definitely a lot more cautions with, like, being sick.
01:38Like, there's, like, you want to get the vaccine, and you also want to make sure that you're not, like, putting your hands in your mouth and doing all these things.
01:44So I feel like I'm, like, a little more aware.
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