Now that it's offically an epidemic, expect routine monitoring by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). What happens is they work in conjunction with the World Health Organiation (WHO).

They screwed up last time. They overreacted. Previously they underreacted. It's very difficult to anticipate biostatistics. They might be gunshy this time, and that could bite us in the ass. This is why you need to make your own decisions based upon good critical thinking, not conjecture. If you think it's going to be bad, see if other good critical thinkers agree because maybe you're freaking out. That's easy to do with pandemics.

They look at initial reports coming in from many countries. They try to project forward based on current data. It's not a science but guessing scientifically.

A lot of people might get sick, but depending upon the economic status, availability of medicine, number of docs, crowding in hospitals, then a lot will change country to country.

In the USA, when an epidemic is happening, then they often do special meetings which are broadcast by the CDC as updates. You can listen to them as they stream. As this bores a lot of people, and as there are few medical technical writers, a lot of what is said, is abbreviated in print. Listening gets you some intel.

Health and Human Services will report on drug and equipment shortages. You can sign up from email messages about that, and then discern how bad things get. Expect initial shortages as medical centers and satelite offices gear up and order more than normal inventory, but then if it keeps happening then bad shortages happen. In a pandemic there's a competition for things like gloves and masks, mundane things that people don't think to look for as intel.

If it gets bad, then they have special meetings, often with state government officials, to ascertain readiness to treat patients, but also in other critical infrastructure roles. These will likely be announced in boring ways among medical forums, and then they post video and audio streams, but often they fail to leave a transcript of those or omit details that are important but sensitive.These are sometimes announced as special commitees in Congress. That's how you find them since they're public meetings.

Sometimes they let their face show more in those meetings because chances are slim that a routine citizen would go to all that trouble and listen.

Then they will create a multi-disciplinary(many fields of study) committee of top scientists. Then they'll report their findings to the President.

They also might create a special meeting or position paper for governors. Governors are supposed to get with state health officials as well as critical infrastructure taskforces to monitor and to make state pandemic plans. They look at their stockpiles of Tamiflu and adjust it. Last time, most states published their pandemic plans on the web. This allows you to read what's the plan, and most people don't read that stuff, so some eye-opening things can be in there, sometimes alarming things.