"Bill Gates says the coronavirus is a pandemic and a 'once-in-a-century pathogen.'"

"Bill Gates has warned for years that the world is not ready for a deadly pandemic...

'In the past week, COVID-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we've been worried about,' Gates wrote in an op-ed for the New England Journal of Medicine...

Gates referred to the outbreak as a pandemic, even though the World Health Organization has not yet made that declaration. The group has said instead that the virus has 'pandemic potential.'

'In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again,' Gates wrote. 'The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point...'

In the op-ed, Gates suggested the following solutions that could slow the virus' spread:

Wealthy countries should supply low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Southern Asia with trained healthcare workers to monitor the virus' spread and deliver vaccines...

Governments and donors should fund manufacturing facilities that can pump out vaccines within weeks.

Gates compared COVID-19 to the 1957 flu pandemic, which killed more than 1 million people, and the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people. The current outbreak, he wrote, is somewhere in between."