Abstract for: A System Dynamics to Optimize Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for Pandemic Response

Severe pandemics are now recognised as catastrophic, multi‑hazard risks alongside climate, cyber and infrastructure threats in the national risk registers. Yet the COVID‑19 experience showed that health systems and supply chains remain highly vulnerable, forcing governments to rely on prolonged lockdowns with enormous social and economic costs, while leaving the industrial capacities needed to alter these trajectories underspecified. The paper develops a System Dynamics model calibrated to the UK’s first COVID‑19 wave (February–November 2020) to examine how timely production of masks, test kits, vaccines, and ventilators can complement lockdowns. It simulates a severe “Disease X” scenario to compare lockdown‑dominant versus production‑enhanced strategies and to derive the weekly product volumes required to achieve specified epidemiological and economic outcomes. The model shows that lockdown‑dominant strategies can contain a severe pandemic but only through early, prolonged, and economically costly restrictions. In contrast, early, local emergency production of masks and test kits substantially lowers infection and hospitalisation peaks, reduces deaths, and allows shorter, less stringent lockdowns. The simulations also quantify weekly production targets for masks, vaccine doses, and ventilators consistent with these improved outcomes. The findings suggest that emergency production capacity should be treated as a core resilience asset within national risk registers and global biosecurity risk‑governance frameworks, rather than as an ad hoc crisis response. By translating public health goals into industrial planning requirements, the study highlights how pandemic preparedness, industrial strategy, and international cooperation on critical supply chains can be better integrated for future pandemic risks. model describing, drafting, summarising, proofreading. All the content has been checked for consistency.