Bill Gates, formerly CEO, chief software architect, and chair of Microsoft, and now devoting his brainpower and passion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has expressed reservations about how the US specifically, and the world on general, is handling the pandemic crisis.
“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….The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important.
“You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And 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.
“It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/bill-gates-on-covid-19-most-tests-are/
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