“If anything kills more than 10 million people in the next decade, it’s likely a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.”
This is what multibillionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, had to say about the next outbreak in a 2015 Ted Talk.
The global community is reeling in fear amid the new coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 20,000 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Little had been invested in the global health care system to prevent the next pandemic, said Gates, before pointing out that the Ebola outbreak exposed a shortage of specialists who were well trained to deal with the epidemic. This should have been used as a case study to prepare for the next one, he said.
“The issue was not that we didn’t have a system that worked well enough, the problem was we didn’t have a system at all. We didn’t have a group of epidemiologists who would have gone, seen what the disease was and how far it had spread.”
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