Bill Gates warned this outbreak 5 years ago — Novel Coronavirus!
First, wish everyone enjoy today’s game — Super Bowl LIV, the 54th Super Bowl and the 50th modern-era National Football League championship game, will decide the champion for the NFL’s 2019 and 100th season!
My topic today is a very heavy and still a fast-developing story all over the world every second while I am typing here — the Wuhan originated new Coronavirus (2019-nCoV).
This outbreak caused at least 50M people in 10+ cities in China locked down started from the epicenter Wuhan, the city with 10M+ population and the geological and transportation hub of China mainland. It drew concern and attention from all over the world since the threat is NOT only in Wuhan, or China, but is spreading worldwide incl. confirmed cases across 26 countries. And at this point, Japan is leading with 20 confirmed cases outside of China. The detailed timeline so far by TIME.
On Google global search trend, it shows clearly a spike of searching “coronavirus” from Jan 12’s week.
And since I’ve been closely following all the information about this outbreak, this morning YouTube “recommended” me below TED Talk video by Bill Gates in 2015.
Unfortunately what Bill Gates warned the whole world 5 years ago became true with today’s Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. While Bill deserves a big THANK YOU by all of us for what he and his foundation already contributed!
In the talk, Bill listed 3 key reasons on why Ebola was avoided to become a global pandemic:
- 1) Ebola does not spread through the air.
- 2) By the time the infected becomes contagious, most people are so sick that they’re bedridden.
- 3) It did NOT get into urban areas.
Let’s give a check on this Wuhan coronavirus per these 3 key aspects:
- 1) It’s already confirmed that this Wuhan coronavirus can also be transmitted by touching an object where airborne droplets have settled.
- 2) It’s already highly contagious during its ~14day long incubation period without any sickness.
- 3) It STARTED from a highly developed urban mega city — Wuhan with more than 10 million people
- + 4) With the super modern transportation network built up in China like the world’s longest high speed rail system, and big size of growing middle class (400M per a report) who can afford to travel outside of China for leisure or business, the spreading of this virus is lot faster than 2003’s SARS or 2014’s Ebola. Btw, 5M ppl left WuHan before the lockdown as part of the lunar new year’s travel rush.
Based on the above comparison between 2014 Ebola outbreak and 2019 Wuhan coronavirus one, I saw a big different from its potential outcome.
While, my point here is NOT about making you feel scared, my hope here is to have you well educated about this outbreak and get prepared for the worst, while still remain optimistic! :)
And let’s do not forget to give our thanks to Bill Gates who has been constantly working hard to educate and warn the whole world of this real threat we are facing today, THANK YOU, Bill!
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