"In 2008, I concluded that the next major pandemic would arrive before 2021."

In Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years:

Because the H5N1 serotype is highly pathogenic and has become ineradicable throughout large parts of Asia, it clearly has a pandemic potential (Li et al. 2004). Heightened awareness of the risks posed by H5N1 led epidemiologists to predict a high probability of pandemic influenza in the not-too-distant future. The following realities indicate the imminence of the risk. The typical frequency of influenza pandemics was once every 50-60 years between 1700 and 1889 (the longest known gap was 52 years, between the pandemics of 1729-1733 and 1781-1782) and only once every 10-40 years since 1889. The recurrence interval, calculated simply as the mean time elapsed between the last six known pandemics, is about 28 years, with the extremes of 6 and 53 years. Adding the mean and the highest interval to 1968 gives a span between 1996 and 2021. We are, probabilistically speaking, very much inside a high-risk zone.

Smil describes this forecast as "no remarkable feat of forecasting, just a simple recognition that pandemics reappear rather frequently."

He demonstrates similar modesty by refraining from calling Sweden a success or failure.

Obviously, you can use these comparisons to portray Sweden as either a success (vis-à-vis Spain, the U.K., or the United States) or a failure (vis-à-vis Germany or Finland). But we will have to wait until the second wave of the pandemic has fully asserted itself to see how such comparisons will fare.

I subscribe to IEEE Spectrum and The Washington Post. It is great to know what is going on in the world, and newsprint has so many uses around the house.