Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a 2015 TED Talk had predicted about a COVID-19-like viral outbreak that could kill over 10 million people globally.

Gates, while speaking at the TED Talk titled The Next Outbreak? We're Not Ready, said, "If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes.”

“The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease, an especially virulent flu, for example, that infects large numbers of people very quickly," he added.

The tech-giant had repeated the same thing two years later at an event in Davos.

This 2015 speech of Bill Gates had gone viral recently after he told Derek Muller, who runs a YouTube channel called Veritasium, that the human race is not prepared for two more threats- climate change and bioterrorism.

"What is the next disaster? What is the one we are not prepared for?" Muller asked Gates referring to his 2015 COVID-19 outbreak warning.

"Well, I'd point out two: one is climate change. Every year that would be death toll even greater than we've had in this pandemic," Gates said.

"Also related to a pandemic is something people don't like to talk about much which is bioterrorism, that somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus and so that means the cost, the chance of running into this is more than just the naturally caused epidemics like the current one," he added.

"My favourite writer Vaclav Smil wrote about all the potential kinds of disasters- like you know the risk of an asteroid, the risk of a yellow-stone eruptions etc," Gates added.

"And in fact, he showed that the pandemics were significantly the biggest thing other than a human-caused nuclear war that we needed to be more prepared for," Gates added.

If you want to listen to the entire interview, then click here.