After more than two years of Covid-19, many people are letting their guard down. But the pandemic is not over yet and, Bill Gates warns, the worst could still be to come.
“We are still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal,” said the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and public health advocate. told the Financial Times on Sunday. “It’s not likely, I don’t want to be a pessimistic voice, but it’s well above the 5% risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst.”
New covid cases, driven by the BA.2 subvariant of the omicron strain of covid, are currently growing in the US: The country’s seven-day average of daily new cases in the US is up to 54,429 as of Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That’s a 9% increase from the previous week, with cases increasing in 39 states during that time period.
But Covid-related deaths are on the decline, prompting White House Covid czar Dr. Ashish Jha to say last month that he’s “not too concerned right now” about BA.2. Rather, his spread is more of a reminder that covid is still lurking and, as Gates points out, the virus could mutate again, leading to a more worrisome strain.
For Gates, one lesson from the Covid pandemic so far is that preventive planning and protective measures could help the world better manage future pandemics. It is the core concept of his next book“How to Prevent the Next Pandemic,” to be published later this year.
One proposal, he says, is for the World Health Organization to launch a global surveillance team, made up of experts who can rapidly detect new health threats around the world and quickly coordinate with global governments to prevent future diseases from becoming in pandemics.
Gates, who called his proposed task force the “Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization” (GERM) initiative, told the Financial Times that the idea would require significant financial investment from the WHO and its member countries to create a global team of experts, including epidemiologists and virologists, and give them the tools they need to proactively identify and contain future outbreaks.
It is a plan that Gates previously floated at the 2022 TED conference in April, where he noted that the WHO would likely need to spend more than $1 billion per year on such a global response team. That is expensive, but the cost of another pandemic could be much higher.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that the Covid pandemic will cost the world economy more than 12.5 billion dollars by 2024. Meanwhile, more than 6.2 million people are believed to have died worldwide from the coronavirus, According to the WHOand Gates has repeatedly said in recent years that the world was not properly prepared for this pandemic.
“It seems crazy to me that we can stop looking at this tragedy and not, on behalf of the citizens of the world, make these investments,” Gates told the Financial Times on Sunday. The line echoed a comment he made at the TED conference in April: “We need to spend billions to save trillions.”
Between the proposed GERM team and other suggestions from his upcoming book, including fighting misinformation and making vaccines more accessible globally, Gates has said his goal for 2022 is “to make sure Covid-19 is the last pandemic”.
And while he cautions against becoming complacent about ongoing Covid risks, the billionaire has also expressed optimism that the coronavirus will be more manageable by this summer, saying in January that, ideally, most Americans will eventually be able to treat to covid as “seasonal disease”. flu.”
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Reference-www.cnbc.com