The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race - Vox
▻https://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8660249/gates-flu-pandemic
lately, Gates has been obsessing over a dark question: what’s likeliest to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? He ticks off the disaster movie stuff — “big volcanic explosion, gigantic earthquake, asteroid” — (...) Then there’s war, of course. But Gates isn’t that worried about war because the entire human race worries about war pretty much all the time (...)
“Well, that was the Spanish flu.”
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The basic reason the disease could spread so fast is that human beings now move around so fast. Gates’s modelers found that about 50 times more people cross borders today than did so in 1918. And any new disease will cross those borders with them — and will do it before we necessarily even know there is a new disease. Remember what Ron Klain said: “If you look at the H1N1 flu in 2009, it had spread around the world before we even knew it existed.”
Gates’s model showed that a Spanish flu–like disease unleashed on the modern world would kill more than 33 million people in 250 days.
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Underdeveloped health systems threaten developed countries