Bill Gates Predicts When Next Pandemic Could Hit the World

In early May, Bill Gates cautioned that the world has yet to see the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of 6.2 million people.

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has told the Spanish newspaper El Diario that “There is a 50 percent chance” that the world community “will have another pandemic” within the next 20 years.

He suggested that it could be a human-made virus or a naturally occurring pandemic, caused by climate change-related consequences.

Gates, who released his new book titled "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic" on 3 May, previously urged governments across the world to shore up on epidemiologists and computer modellers to help identify global health threats.

According to him, in addition to global surveillance to spot pandemic dangers, increased spending is needed to improve preparedness for health threats.

Gates called his plan the "Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization" initiative, suggesting that only the World Health Organisation (WHO) can build and manage a “top-notch” team of experts, with funding worth an estimated $1 billion per year.

The billionaire claimed earlier this month that the world is “still at risk of this [COVID-19] pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal”.

“It's not likely, I don't want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it's way above a 5 percent risk that this pandemic, we haven't even seen the worst of it,” the tech mogul was quoted by the Financial Times as saying.

In 2015, Gates was the first to caution publicly that the "world was not ready for the inevitable next pandemic" and that viruses rather than war pose the greatest risk of "global catastrophe".

As for the current coronavirus pandemic, the number of confirmed cases soared to more than 528 million, with 6.2 million fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University’s latest estimates.