Call it SickCity.
It's a computer simulation à la SimCity designed to prep public health and safety officials to respond quickly and effectively in the event of a biochemical attack.
Developed by Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, the anti-terrorism decision-analysis system -- which for now focuses on San Francisco -- confronts subjects with a constant stream of incoming crisis data from hospitals, private physicians, law-enforcement agencies, pharmaceutical supply depots, the weather service and various other agencies.
Seated like Captain Kirk in front of three giant display screens at Sandia's Visualization Design Center, participants can call up geographical views with reports of disease symptoms and confirmed cases superimposed over specific neighborhoods, detailed background information on each patient, pie charts and graphs of emergency resources and views of weather and wind data.
Sandia analysts flanking the "hot seat," prompt the participants for decisions at key moments and the VDC computer may -- or, more often at this stage of the simulation's development, may not -- offer a cautionary admonition or proactive comment.
"The WMD-DAC (Weapons of Mass Destruction Decision Analysis Center) program is still fairly unsophisticated," said Sandia spokesman Mike Janes. "One of the things we're doing is taking information we receive from officials going through the simulation and feeding it back into the program to further hone it."
Janes said the program currently factors such climatic data as prevailing winds into its airborne-virus dispersion calculations. The program is being upgraded "with the knowledge that we don't deal with a static population."
New data being modeled for that update is intended to reflect the differences between nighttime and daytime population and traffic patterns, the number of people in schools at specific hours, the geographic distribution of the area's workforce, and how many people are at major shopping areas at a given time.
San Francisco's status as a major tourist destination could also be taken into consideration during simulations of events involving person-to-person communicable diseases such as smallpox, which may require closing airports and other transportation facilities.
Other enhancements being discussed include expanding the program to cover the entire nine-county Bay Area instead of just metropolitan San Francisco and coordinating it with a Sandia project designed to decrease the timeline between the release and detection of biological agents.
"It's a very impressive theater kind of setting," said Jeanne Perkins, head of the Association of Bay Area Governments' Earthquake Program. "It doesn't have 3-D graphics like SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon, but it would be very entertaining if it weren't a deadly serious business."
According to Perkins, the questions raised during the simulated run were informative as well as interrogative.
"The particular scenario we went through involved an outbreak of anthrax," Perkins said. "First, you have to analyze the data and make sure you're dealing with anthrax and not some form of flu. You have to try and pin down where the infected individuals may have contracted the disease.... Could they all have gotten it from one source?
"At various points you have to decide whether to go public with the information and call up supplies of anthrax antibiotics from the national stockpile. If you answer 'yes,' the program tells you how many doses of the antibiotics you can have and how long it will take to get them."
Though no active work on taking the program live is currently underway, Janes would not rule out the possibility that it may someday be used as a decision-enhancing tool for officials responding to an actual attack.
"(The simulation) pulls data from real sources," he said, "but it's obviously not live data. Depending on (the kind of) communication facilities available in the future, it might be adaptable to operating in real time."
