Imagine sweeping through green fields, floating five feet above ground, sun on your face as you slide by on track to your destination, not a car in the world, as you simply lean back.

And before you know it, you're there.

This is how travel should feel, and on our trains, it does.

Avanti West Coast. Feel good, travel.

This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Maddie Bender.

In central Texas, in the back of a black doubt government bus, three health workers stood over coughing patients.

They had 10 minutes to put on personal protective equipment and perform nasal swabs on the infected.

So just right here, sir, you're gonna go back down and kind of twirl us around. I'm so sorry.

Okay, and then we're gonna do one on the other side, and that'll be it. All right, you did good.

This sadly might sound like a voice we've heard over the last year as we've received a nasal swab for COVID-19.

Talk to us a little bit about how you were feeling throughout this entire scenario with these patients who are coughing, and we don't know what this virus is.

Very nervous. I was scared because I didn't know exactly what to do.

The thing is, none of this was real. The patients were mannequins, and this was done in 2019.

But it sure turned out to be prescient, and more importantly, according to new research, it helped a healthcare system prepare for when an actual deadly pandemic arrived in the US in 2020, all because of escape rooms and zombies.

Chances are you've been to or heard about escape rooms, which are timed games where teams find clues and solve puzzles with the goal of getting out of a room.

Today, there are tens of thousands of them worldwide. But in 2017, Kristi Cosy and Grace Postman wanted to bring a different kind of escape room to the Central Texas Veterans Healthcare System to highlight the importance of handwashing and proper use of personal protective equipment or PPE.

Two years and five iterations later, they changed the theme of the room to pandemic influenza. But when they were first starting out, they took inspiration from a popular TV show at the time.

We had zombie sounds playing throughout the room, simulated blood that we had placed on the walls, somebody donated a projector that had zombies kind of looking like they were trying to come through a window, so we put that up.

Kristi Cosy, whose official role is the simulation educator for the Central Texas Veterans Healthcare System. She says that boring PowerPoints to teach clinicians about infection prevention simply weren't cutting it.

So when Postman came to her with the idea for a zombie-themed escape room, she says it was a no-brainer.

If a novel approach, we started looking for articles and at that time we found only one article in the literature that said they'd even attempted to do an escape room within a healthcare setting.

Cosy and Postman wanted to draw attention to highly effective infection prevention practices and what happens when you don't follow them.

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