Microsoft co-founder and longtime philanthropist Bill Gates said considering all things there is room for positivity. In the past, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy. However, taking the economy back and making money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. He also stated that it will be a pain in the economic dimension while reducing the pain in the disease and death dimension.
Mr. Gates in a recent TED Connects series interview about the Coronavirus said that there is a need extreme shutdown that lasts up to six to ten weeks so if things go well then you can start opening back up. Our motive should be to get to the point where a very minimal percentage of the population is infected by the coronavirus. He added for this we need a combination of testing and isolation. Gates said everybody should have been on notice long ago in January. The virus was discovered in China in December.
Missed Opportunity
The act should have been taken where there were hundreds of cases. At that stage, it would have been possible to control the spread by doing great testing and great contact tracing and limiting foreigners arriving in without as much damage to your economy. The US has missed the opportunity to control the situation without shutdown. The country could have observed the mistakes which Italy did and should have taken steps accordingly. As a result, we missed the chance to avoid a shutdown.
As the coronavirus is a respiratory virus there is a chance that the force of infection will go down. The philanthropist also said COVID-19 is more infectious than MERS or SARS but it isn’t as deadly.
What surprising is the fact that nearly five years ago Gates predicted we would not be ready for the next global outbreak.
For more Press Release news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
