US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — According to Bill Gates, one of the founders of Microsoft, the coronavirus pandemic is a “nightmare scenario,” but the death toll will be lower than some predicted, including President Donald Trump.
Trump predicted last week that until the COVID-19 outbreak was completely suppressed, between 100,000 and 240,000 people would die in the United States, repeating the forecasts of White House health adviser Anthony Fauci.
“With self-isolation, we will get out of the crisis with a much lower number of deaths,” Gates told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. He said that it’s “very important” to constantly call these numbers so that people understand the seriousness of the situation.
As of Sunday, at least 312,245 confirmed cases were reported in the United States, including over 8,500 deaths. Worldwide, more than 1.2 million cases and a minimum of 65,711 deaths are registered.
Gates, who left Microsoft’s board last month to focus on charity, said that if people continued to maintain self-isolation and quarantine, the situation should begin to straighten out by the end of this month.
“This is a nightmare scenario because the transmission of respiratory viruses from person to person can grow exponentially,” he suggested. “And you know, if we continued to go to work and travel as usual, this curve would bend until enough people were infected. A lot of people will go to the hospital, and there will be many deaths.”
Gates predicted that everything would “truly normalize only when we got a vaccine available almost everywhere in the world.”
Stating that the coronavirus pandemic was “super bad”, Gates admitted that this was not the worst case, citing a low mortality rate from COVID-19 compared to other diseases like smallpox.
Earlier, Gates suggested that the United States missed its chance to dispense with mandatory quarantine and closures, because they delayed the response to the pandemic.
In 2015, Gates warned that the greatest threat to millions of lives in the coming decades would be not war, but disease. Since then, only 5% of the necessary measures have been taken to prevent a pandemic like a coronavirus, Gates suggested.
“It’s hard to invest in something when you don’t know exactly whether it will happen or not,” he said. “I’m sure that after such a huge blow, the money will be invested.”
In February, Gates announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would spend up to $ 100 million on a global response to COVID-19.
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