Secret planning exercise in 2016 modelled impact of Mers outbreak in UK
by Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent from on (#5JWJA)
Expert says Exercise Alice, one of 10 exercises disclosed under FoI, could have been relevant to Covid response
The government ran an exercise modelling the impact of a coronavirus outbreak four years before the Covid-19 outbreak but tried to keep it secret, the Guardian has learned.
The previously unpublicised Exercise Alice took place in 2016 involving officials from Public Health England (PHE) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and envisioned an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which is caused by a coronavirus.
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