How fake news works

Won't that just put you off your cornflakes? Right at the top of the page, a deadly virus -- coming right at you! 

Or not. Does it seem a little less exciting when you click through to the Metro story?

Pesky news routines! The headline doesn't tell you whether it's "this" pandemic or "any old" pandemic, but at least -- well, what is it?

A chilling simulation has revealed just how easily a new pathogen could wipe out a huge slice of the world’s population – up to 900 million people.

Researchers at John* Hopkins University simulated the spread of a new illness – a new type of parainfluenza, known as Clade X.

How many experts, and what are they warning us about?

American politicians played out the scenario – which was built to be extremely realistic – where a doomsday cult released a genetically engineered virus.

By the end of the simulation in May, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the world – and no vaccine.

The researchers say that the simulation would have ended with up to 900 million dead, nearly 10% of the world’s population.

That'd be a good bit more than 10% of the world's population, but of course that's not what the experts said, given that -- as the preceding paragraph says --  the simulation ended with 150 million dead. (None of them killed by either Clade X or Bigfoot.) Metro is playing at news, not doing news; there are two outgoing links in the text, but both go to versions of the same Business Insider story.

Business Insider doesn't exactly cover itself with glory either, which should be a sign unto you when you see it quoted regularly. But it does get some details:

On May 15, when the "Clade X" simulation was played out real-time, the people acting out the scenario were the sorts of individuals who'd be responding to this situation in real life.

... Yet by the day's end, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the globe, and 15 to 20 million deaths in the US alone.

With no vaccine for the illness yet ready, that death toll would have been expected to climb.

"I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this," Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health Security and the designer of the Clade X simulation, told Business Insider.

... "If efforts to develop a vaccine continued to fail, Toner said a disease like this could kill 900 million people, or more than 10 percent of the world's population.

Let the record show here that I have no objection to stories about sandtable exercises or about public perceptions of responses to emergencies (that's one of the things I write about). This seems like a pretty good story idea -- so good that it would be surprising if someone hadn't covered it back in May. The Washington Post, for example:

A novel virus, moderately contagious and moderately lethal, has surfaced and is spreading rapidly around the globe. Outbreaks first appear in Frankfurt, Germany, and Caracas, Venezuela. The virus is transmitted person-to-person, primarily by coughing. There are no effective antivirals or vaccines. U.S. troops stationed abroad are infected. Now the first case to reach the United States had been identified on a small college campus in Massachusetts.

So began a recent day-long exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The simulation mixed details of past disasters with fictional elements to force government officials and experts to make the kinds of key decisions they could face in a real pandemic.

It was a tense day. The exercise was inspired in part by the troubled response to the Ebola epidemic of 2014, and everyone involved was acutely aware of the very real and ongoing Ebola outbreak spreading in Congo.

In the simulation, a bipartisan group of current and former high-ranking U.S. government officials played a team of presidential advisers faced with a host of real-world policy, political and ethical dilemmas. The actors included former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who played the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.), who played herself. They had to react as the outbreak unfolded according to a script provided by Johns Hopkins, with no advance knowledge about how the mock disaster would play out.

I could do without any more headlines that begin "This" forever, but otherwise a pretty nice story. Not at all what you might think if you get your news from the Drudge Report, though.

* Yes, this would have been a red flag for a real editor.