“What’s our best guess now?” the Strategist said in a tone that bordered on mockery.
“It would just be a shot in the dark,” I said.
“Then give me a fucking shot in the dark!” he spluttered. “Come on, people, am I the only one who sees icebergs floating out there?”
I said, “We can have our stats guy do an estimate tomorrow, maybe a couple of scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and so on.”
“Tomorrow? Am I talking to myself here?” the Strategist asked the room. “Call him now.”
“It’s Sunday morning,” I replied. “I have no idea how to reach him.”
The Strategist ripped a sheet of paper from his legal pad. He thrust it at me. “Write his name down and whatever else you know about him.” I did as I was told. The Strategist took the paper from me without saying anything and walked out of the room. Even now I am not sure where he went.
The rest of us looked at each other until the President broke the awkward silence. “He’s right. We can’t wish this thing away.”
The Director of the NIH shifted somewhat uncomfortably in her seat. She and I made eye contact, acknowledging to each other that it would be more sensible to wait for better data. I raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “What should we do?”
The Director of the NIH, to her credit, pushed back against the President. “We’ll have to treat this number with skepticism,” she warned.
“We know that,” the Secretary of Defense said. “This number is not going outside this room. It’s a start. We’ll build a more sophisticated model when we get better data. For now it’s something, and something is better than nothing.”
The Strategist walked back into the room. He handed the piece of paper back to me with a phone number scrawled on the bottom. “It’s a cell phone,” he said.
I looked at the number, trying to make out the last four digits. The writing was tiny and childlike. “You can use my small office,” the President offered as I was trying to decipher the handwriting.
“Is that a one or a seven?” I asked the Strategist, pointing at the penultimate digit.
“Sorry,” he said, genuinely apologetic. “It’s a seven. Four-zero-seven-nine. Sorry.” At that moment, I had what I can only describe as a burst of awareness. There were many other times when the gravity and bizarreness of the situation struck me: the first time I walked into the Oval Office; the first time the working group looked to me for an authoritative opinion. But this was different—less intellectual and more emotional, like looking up at the stars on a clear New Hampshire night and feeling the incomprehensible size of the universe. Of course, any middle school graduate understands that the universe is enormous and expanding, but there is something about those special moments when a bright night sky makes one appreciate emotionally what it really means. And then the feeling passes, as quickly as it arrived.
So it was as I tried to read the Strategist’s handwriting. His chicken-scratch penmanship was so banal, yet the reason he had written down the number was so significant. The combination of the comic and the scary gave me this momentary emotional sense of what was happening. “You can use my small office,” the President repeated.
I called what was apparently Tie Guy’s cell phone. It rang four or five times and then went to voice mail. I left a short, cryptic message telling him to call me back immediately. The White House operator had given me an outside line. I did not know whether the number would show up on caller ID as “White House” or “blocked” or maybe something else. On a hunch, I waited a few moments and dialed again. Tie Guy picked up this time. “Hello?” he said. I had not woken him up, but his tone suggested surprise, or maybe wariness. I tried to walk the line between urgency and panic, explaining that I needed him to give me some estimates for the likely trajectory of the Capellaviridae epidemic. “That’s why I’m doing the sampling,” he said. “I told you, I’ll have numbers on Tuesday.”
“I need something now,” I said.
“It’s Sunday morning,” he answered, more perplexed than annoyed.
“I know. I’m in a meeting and I need our best estimate for the number of Capellaviridae fatalities if the virus were not treated with Dormigen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“That’s not important,” I said with faux-authority.
“Well, it’s obviously important to someone.”
“The Director. She’s in the meeting. She wants numbers. Now.”
“Is this some kind of terrorist thing? Is that what’s going on?” he asked.
“No,” I said firmly. “It’s a lurking virus that has turned virulent. That’s what they do.”
“Yeah, but a terrorist group could have figured out how to trigger the virus.”
The thought had occurred to me, but there was no country, let alone a terrorist group, with that kind of scientific expertise. “No,” I said, with real authority this time. “Look, I’m in a meeting. The Director is literally in the other room waiting for me to get off the phone. I need you to give me your worst-case scenario, your best-case scenario, and what you think is the most likely fatality rate. Give me those three numbers.”
“You want me to make something up?”
“No. I want you to give me an informed inference based on what you have seen so far.”
“Okay, can I think for a second?” he asked. His tone had turned modestly more cooperative.
“Of course.”
There was a brief silence. “But we have Dormigen, right?” Tie Guy asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “We’re just trying to get our mind around the virus—to isolate what’s happening there. So give me your best estimate of what would happen without Dormigen.”
Tie Guy gave me his numbers. I wrote them down on the same sheet of paper, right below where the Strategist had scrawled the phone number. I did not really process the numbers as I wrote them down. The conversation had meandered, and I was feeling pressure to get back to the meeting. Also, I was not privy to the Dormigen supply calculations (mostly because I had not asked), so the figures Tie Guy gave me had no context. I walked back into the Oval Office and handed the sheet to the Strategist. He looked at them, betraying no emotion, and then typed them into the spreadsheet.
The Strategist read out the results with a similar lack of emotion, which is eerie in hindsight. “Worst-case: three-point-two-five million. Best-case: seven hundred thousand. Most likely: two million.” The room was silent, until the Acting Secretary of HHS asked, “I’m sorry, I’m the new guy here. Two million what?”
“Two million deaths,” the Strategist said.
“No, that’s not right,” the NIH Director said quickly. “Those figures have no basis in reality.”
The Strategist looked at her. He started to say something and then stopped himself. The room went silent again. I had a feeling that the President was the only person who could speak next, which turned out to be correct. “We have commitments for enough Dormigen to deal with any of those scenarios,” the President said.
“Commitments,” the Strategist said.
“Mr. President, you need to start working the phones,” the Chief of Staff said.
“Clear my schedule tomorrow. I’ll make the calls.”
The Acting Secretary of HHS looked around the room. He had an uncharacteristically dazed expression. After a moment, he said, “Again, I know I’m the new guy here, but if I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing…” He paused to gather his thoughts. “Well, we’ve got a serious situation.” The rest of us had become desensitized to what was happening, the policy equivalent of the frog being slowly boiled alive. One meeting had led to the next, and while each one was serious, the progression left us oddly inured to the magnitude of what was going on. The Acting Secretary had just given the room a collective slap in the face. In that moment, I felt both terrified and relieved—terrified by the number of planes that might fall out of the sky, and relieved that I was no longer the only one seeing it.