Simulations of epidemics

In the last twenty years, exercises of simulation have been transferred from the world of nuclear weapons and civil defence to the world of natural disasters and epidemics. Based on worst-case scenarios, they aim at preparing populations for a catastrophic event whose probability is unknown, by imagining its consequences. They have changed the rules of public health by introducing fiction as a technique of risk management in hospitals. Drawing on the memory of past epidemics, they require actors to simulate the next epidemic to come. But this jump into fiction also creates connections between spaces that don’t share epidemics, and gaps in the general framework of public health, leaving in the margins other diseases for which no catastrophic scenario has been built. This chapter explores the disjunctions in the world of epidemic simulation by looking at the behaviour of actors in simulations of epidemics in Asia and Africa. Beyond the mediatic images of simulations produced by public health authorities, actors themselves, often coming from lower ranks of hospitals, express irony or critique to distance themselves from the scenario. Drawing from the anthropology of ritual, this chapter analyses what simulation does to the competences of the actors involved, and how they manage to perform the simulation without believing in the reality of the epidemic to come.