Philanthropist warns deaths may spike again this winter but the worst will be over by 2022 if a vaccine can be distributed globally
The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is “pessimistic” about the coming months and warned Covid-19 deaths could rise again to the levels seen in the first wave of the pandemic unless governments take effective action.
“I’m pessimistic about what the fall in the northern hemisphere is likely to look like,” he said. “If we don’t have interventions, the death rate in a number of countries including the United States will go back up to the levels that we had in the spring.”
Talking to The Telegraph for the launch of the annual Goalkeepers report, which tracks the world’s progress against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Mr Gates said the pandemic could push the world back to the 1990s in terms of development.
A wide range of indicators, ranging from maternal and infant mortality to hunger and education, have already moved into reverse after decades of progress and will end up costing many more lives than the coronavirus itself.
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“We’ve been set back about 25 years,” he said. “I would expect substantially more deaths from the indirect effects than from the direct effects [of the virus].”
In the introduction to the Goalkeepers report, Mr Gates and his wife Melinda draw parallels with the 1918 Spanish Flu which sparked “a set of mutually exacerbating catastrophes”.
“In the blink of an eye, a health crisis became an economic crisis, a food crisis, a housing crisis, a political crisis. Everything collided with everything else.
“Mutually exacerbating catastrophes is an apt description for the Covid-19 pandemic, too,” they write.
Though clear-eyed about the long term damage being done (and irked by the poor preparation and response of some countries), Mr Gates was optimistic that, with a vaccine and cooperation between nations, the worst would be over within two years.
By next summer, we’ll be getting vaccines out to all the countries of the world,” he said. “Even at a 60 per cent vaccination level, you should be able to stop almost all of the exponential disease spread.
“So, you know, I’m optimistic that next year will be the year that we bring the numbers down very, very dramatically, and that this thing will be over by sometime in 2022.”
But the worst impacts of the Covid pandemic will only be prevented through a collaborative global response: “There is no such thing as a national solution to a global crisis. All countries must work together to end the pandemic and begin rebuilding economies.
“The longer it takes us to realise that, the longer it will take (and the more it will cost) to get back on our feet.”
Asked about different countries’ planning and response to the pandemic, Mr Gates said the picture was mixed.
He tended towards thinking Sweden had made a “mistake” in taking a more liberal approach to lockdown, but added that it may have built more natural immunity as a result. Only time would tell.
In the US, he contrasted the investment his country had made in the race to find a vaccine – “far, far more funding than everyone else put together” – with its failure to quickly roll out testing and get an early grip on the outbreak. This despite the US having “way more” PCR machines per head of population than any other country.
The UK, like America, he said, had not performed as well as countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which benefited from their experience of Sars and Mers and got their testing and behavioural interventions right from the start.
“The UK and the US will have a lot of examination to do to look back and say, okay, what should we have done differently so that when pandemic two comes we get really good tests and quick turnaround overnight.”
A bright point for the UK, he added, was its organisation of clinical trials – something that had already borne fruit with confirmation that the steriods dexamethasone and hydrocortisone improve survival rates for Covid patients.
Mr Gates cast the US decision to pull out of the World Health Organization (WHO) because of its alleged closeness to China as paradoxical and counterproductive.
“One of the great ironies is that if you ask: ‘hey, does the WHO have a particularly strong relationship with some country? Is there some country that is in the hallways and influencing what goes on in the WHO?’ The answer is, ‘absolutely, yes’. That country is the United States of America.
“There is no UN organisation that is more associated with a single country than the WHO is associated with the United States,” he said.
