Coronavirus pandemic: Bill Gates warned us that this day would come five years ago

• Bill Gates warned the world that the next global crisis to hit the world, wouldn’t be a war, but a highly infectious virus.
• During a Ted Talk in 2015, Gates pointed out that a global healthcare system needs to be put in place to come out ahead of the problem.
• He suggested five ways in which the world can prepare itself for when the next epidemic takes place.

Five years before the coronavirus outbreak — when the world was recovering from the Ebola epidemic — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned the world that another healthcare disaster could be on its way.

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war — not missiles but microbes,” he said during a 2015 Ted Talk.

Unlike Hollywood, where a group of handsome epidemiologists fly into a crisis and save the day — the reality on the ground is very different, Gates had said. However, preparing for an outbreak isn’t all that different from preparing from a health crisis.

“We can build a really good response. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about. We’ve got cellphones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they’re moving,” he said.

According to Gates, we already have the tools — we just need to put them into the overall global health system. His company has already demonstrated one way of doing that. Microsoft Bing released an interactive map tool that lets people follow the spread of the infection online.

Here’s what Microsoft co-founder suggests are the key pieces to fight off an epidemic: