Posted on 04/11/2020 12:57:01 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials continue to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 132 people in China and sickened 6,100 worldwide. And back in 2018, Billionaire Bill Gates gave a warning that the world wasn’t prepared for pandemics, which should “concern us all.”
Speaking at an event hosted by Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on April 27, 2018, Gates said he believed “the world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”
“This preparation includes staging simulations, war games and preparedness exercises so that we can better understand how diseases will spread and how to deal with responses such as quarantine and communications to minimize panic,” Gates said.
Pandemics occur when epidemics spread between countries. And though coronavirus is not considered a pandemic, the spread of such viruses is a serious concern.
Gates noted that while a 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza (dubbed the swine flu) wasn’t as lethal as people initially feared, it did call attention to the fact that the world doesn’t have a coordinated approach to help with early detection and spread of pandemics.
“The Ebola epidemic in West Africa four years ago was another wake up call, as the number of confirmed cases climbed, the death toll mounted, and local health systems collapsed. Again, the world was much too slow to respond,” he said of the 2014-2016 epidemic, which killed 11,000 and infected more than 28,000. Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the United States during that epidemic, according to the CDC.
Gates also compared future deadly global pandemics to a new type of “military weapon.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
And the Democrats will be all for it. Conservatives will point out the hypocrisy of the party that vociferously opposes voter I.d. being all in on “tracking” but that will be ignored.
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