bill gates

Bill Gates speaks during All In WA: A Concert For COVID-19 Relief on June 24, 2020 in Washington. Photo: AFP/Getty Images for All In WA

COVID-19: Bill Gates predicts two possible end dates for the pandemic

Bill Gates estimates that the novel coronavirus will be around longer for certain segments of the society. Here’s what he had to say.

bill gates

Bill Gates speaks during All In WA: A Concert For COVID-19 Relief on June 24, 2020 in Washington. Photo: AFP/Getty Images for All In WA

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, believes that the novel coronavirus will affect third world countries for longer than more affluent countries.

Bill Gates on COVID-19 vaccines

Speaking to Wired magazine, Gates said innovation around the pandemic, from scaling up on diagnostics, new therapeutics and vaccines, is “actually quite impressive”.

However, Gates believes that first world countries and third world countries could be looking at very different timelines with regards to when the pandemic may end.

“That makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place”.

He explains that “whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability”.

Gates believes that a vaccine will be created in due course, but explains that scale and manufacturing issues will enable mostly wealthy countries to benefit from the early stages of vaccine trials and testings.

Criticism of America’s pandemic response

That said, Gates still realises that the COVID-19 outbreak has set countries of all sizes and GDP back years as far as economic growth and progress in fighting malaria, polio and HIV. 

A quick glance at the figures shows that the United States is still the hardest-hit country in the world, now with 5 201 064 confirmed cases, 2 370 464 active cases, 165 620 total deaths and 2 664 980 recoveries.

In fact, Gates has harsh words for how America is dealing with the pandemic, particularly the failings of the US testing system and how President Donald Trump has been dealing with the crisis.

Also read — COVID-19: Private hospitals ‘to take public patients’ in Gauteng

‘We’d be dramatically better off’

In another interview, Gates said that the high US caseload is due to lack of testing and contact tracing, as well as the large portions of the population refusing to wear face masks and adhering to social distancing protocols.

Gates has been warning us about a global pandemic for years and said he is disappointed with how the US is handling the pandemic. He explains:

“If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine platforms, and if we’d done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we’d be dramatically better off. Then there’s the time period of the first few months of the pandemic when the US actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn’t work at first, and they weren’t letting people test”.

He added that the travel ban “came too late and it was too narrow to do anything”. According to Gates, it was only after the first few months that “we eventually figured out about masks and that leadership is important”.