In Pics | These personalities had warned about unpreparedness to tackle a pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the foundation of the civilisation. The virus has affected more than 2 million people around the world. However, a few people had pointed about the pandemic world will witness in coming days and the lack of preparedness to deal with the crisis. Here's a list of people who warned about an impending global health threat long ago. (Image: Reuters)

Bill Gates | In a 2015 TED talk, Gates had said the world was “not ready for the next epidemic.” Not just once, he talked about this again in a discussion hosted by Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, where he clearly said that a pandemic could impact humanity in the next 10 years killing 30 million people within six months. (Image: PTI)

Michael Osterholm | In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2005 Osterholm warned about a global pandemic. The University of Minnesota-based expert specifically said that the US is the least prepared country to combat the pandemic due to shortage of equipment and supplies. (Image: cidrap.umn.edu)

Scott Z Burn and Steven Soderbergh | The screenwriter and director duo of 2011 film "Contagion" is weaved around a fictionalised version of global epidemic depicting a flu transmission from a bat to a pig to a person to another person. (Image: Reuters)

Robert G Webster | In his book "Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus", the expert warned that world needs to be prepared for a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 influenza virus. (Image: otago.ac.nz)

Dr Luciana Borio | The former member of the White House National Security Council also warned the world about the threat of pandemic flu in coming future. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Jeremy Konyndyk | Former director of USAID's Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance wrote that “a major new global health crisis is a question of when, not if. At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge—like the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people." (Image: cgdev.org)

Dean Koontz | The American novelist predicted the pandemic in a 1981 novel called "The Eye of Darkness" which referred to a virus called "Wuhan-400", the epicentre of the virus in China. (Image: deankoontz.com)