The COVID-19 coronavirus has been officially declared a pandemic. The economy responded with pure panic and Flight-to-quality, countries are stepping up their safety measures, and authorities have taken all kinds of decisions, from suspending public events to a total lockdown. And amid that chaos, a video began circulating of a TED talk that philanthropist and tycoon Bill Gates gave in 2015. In it, he explored the latent threat posed by viruses and bacteria, and left a powerful message: "We are not ready for the next epidemic."
Who Is to Blame?
One of the questions everyone is asking is obviously "who is to blame?" Can we talk about China as the point of origin? What about the rest of the countries? And the protocols designed by health experts? Did their content fail, or the implementation? What about coordination efforts? And the contradictions among specialists? On one hand, we have doctors saying that COVID-19 is not so serious, that there is no need to stockpile provisions or wear masks, and on the other hand, we hear Italian doctors who literally apply triage to prioritize care for their patients.
A Prescient Warning
And the Web doesn't stay still. It searches for precedents, explores archives, reviews videos. One of them is already making the rounds on social media. It's a TED talk that Bill Gates himself gave in Vancouver in March 2015. That talk is exactly five years old, and at the time, the world faced another threat in the form of an Ebola epidemic that ended up killing more than 11,000 people. (Editor's note: It has Spanish subtitles.)
Gates begins the talk with an anecdote and two giant cans of provisions: When he was little, the public "panic" was focused on the possibility of a nuclear war. But in recent decades, the most powerful governments in the world have invested real fortunes in deterrence mechanisms. The concept of "mutually assured destruction" prevented atomic exchange. However, those governments did not show the same interest in a hypothetical viral apocalypse. Bill Gates explains at the beginning of his talk that if "something" kills 10 million people in the next decade, it won't be missiles, but microbes.
Citing the case of Ebola, Gates said that the problem was not in "a failure of the system," but that "there was no system" at all. Reports were made on paper, took a long time to digitize, and arrived full of errors. Doctors Without Borders did a good job with its volunteers, but that effort was insufficient. There were no tools, nor a common strategy to start treatments. A large-scale epidemic could demand hundreds of thousands of workers in action. The World Health Organization has funds to monitor epidemics, but not to deploy those vital resources.
https://old.neoteo.com/coronavirus-mapa-interactivo-de-infecciones/A Costly Inaction
In short, we were lucky with Ebola (the very nature of the virus limited its spread), but next time, that luck could run out. Bill Gates presented in the talk a model based on the 1918 Spanish flu... which kills 30 million people in less than a year. However, he also said that we have the capacity to build a solid response system, with enormous technological backing, portable communication, satellite maps, biological resources, and much more. He recommended "germ games," simulations similar to the "war games" that many forces carry out around the globe, and a close link between medical and military forces to reach the most compromised places quickly and safely.
To finish, Bill Gates threw out a number: Three trillion dollars estimated by the World Bank as a loss in the event of a large-scale influenza epidemic. He also added that "there is no need to panic," but that "they should start now, because time is not on our side." Seeing what happened with the coronavirus, we could come to a conclusion: We never started.
