“The Most Predictable Disaster in the History of the Human Race: This Is What Bill Gates Is Afraid Of”, 2015-05-27 (; similar):
But 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”—but says the more he learns about them, the more he realizes the probability is “very low.” 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, and the most dangerous kind of war, nuclear war, seems pretty contained, at least for now.
But there’s something out there that’s as bad as war, something that kills as many people as war, and Gates doesn’t think we’re ready for it. “Look at the death chart of the 20th century”, he says, because he’s the kind of guy that looks at death charts. “I think everybody would say there must be a spike for World War I. Sure enough, there it is, like 25 million. And there must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is, it’s like 65 million. But then you’ll see this other spike that is as large as World War II right after World War I, and most people, would say, ‘What was that?’” “Well, that was the Spanish flu.”
No one can say we weren’t warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before…“You can’t use the word lucky or fortunate about something like Ebola that killed 10,000 people”, Klain says. “But it was the most favorable scenario for the world to face one of these things. Ebola is very difficult to transmit. Everyone who is contagious has a visible symptom. It broke out in three relatively small countries that don’t send many travelers to the US. And those three countries have good relationships with America and were welcoming of Western aid.” “With a pandemic flu, the disease would be much more contagious than Ebola”, Klain continues. “The people who are contagious may not have visible symptoms. It could break out in a highly populous country that sends thousands of travelers a day to the US. It could be a country with megacities with tens of millions of people. And it could be a country where sending in the 101st Airborne isn’t possible.”
…Behind Gates’s fear of pandemic disease is an algorithmic model of how disease moves through the modern world. He funded that model to help with his foundation’s work eradicating polio. But then he used it to look into how a disease that acted like the Spanish flu of 1918 would work in today’s world. The results were shocking, even to Gates. “Within 60 days it’s basically in all urban centers around the entire globe”, he says. “That didn’t happen with the Spanish flu.”