New York (CNN Business) – The ability of some parts of United States to begin to safely and effectively lift the restrictions of coronavirus It will depend on the country’s ability to test and aggressively track new cases of the virus, Bill Gates on Sunday told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
Your comments occur when multiple US states. USA They are preparing to ease social distancing and restrictions on staying home this week, despite warnings from health researchers that no state should reopen before May 1. Meanwhile, the total number of reported coronavirus cases in the United States is close to one million, and more than 54,000 Americans have died.
Gates, the founder of Microsoft, whose foundation has studied pandemics for years and is now involved in the fight against the coronavirus, warned that just because some areas seeking to reopen have experienced relatively small outbreaks doesn’t mean they aren’t at risk.
Many are concerned that reopening too soon could lead to a second wave of infections in the United States as deadly as the first. States must weigh that risk against trying to recover from the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus-related closures.
“If they open, they can return to exponential growth (from coronavirus infections) and compete with New York on that basis,” Gates said, adding that areas that reopen and allow people to move could also sow infections. in other parts of the country, further slowing recovery from the pandemic.
How to reopen
Successful reopens will happen in stages, Gates said, a recommendation that is in line with suggestions from many health experts and economists, including the World Health Organization. And it will require critical thinking about which elements of society are most essential for returning to work, implementing security measures as they are reopened, and ensuring that diagnostic testing and contact tracing are in place to understand the effects that Relief restrictions have on the spread of the virus.
“What we don’t know is, (if) we go back to normal a little bit, what activities create the risk of a rebound?” Gates said. “We need to establish a very dense testing regimen so that you detect that rebound going back to exponential growth very quickly and don’t wait for the ICUs to fill up and there are many deaths. If you see the critical point, you can understand the activities that cause it. ”
In two suggested plans to reopen the US economy. In the U.S., public health experts and economists said the country would have to run millions of diagnostic tests every week before restrictions could be safely lifted.
Gates said Sunday that the new machines and testing methods should soon be able to get the United States to perform between 400,000 and 500,000 tests per day, although that is “just enough to really track.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, calculated on Saturday that the country is conducting approximately .5 million to 2 million covid-19 tests per week and said that the ability to Test will double in several more weeks. So far, the United States has only conducted about 4 million coronavirus tests.
Gates added: “However, the importance of EE. USA is that this focus on the number of tests underestimates the cacophony and the mistakes we made in the test system, ”including scarcity, inequality in who can access them, and test results that take more than 24 hours to reach to the patients.
As the country increases testing and monitoring, cities and states should have a phased reopening of various parts of the economy, Gates said, although he admitted that “we are a bit naive about how to prioritize these activities.”
In Georgia on Friday, Governor Brian Kemp allowed the reopening of beauty salons, tattoo parlors, gyms, and bowling alleys, with some warnings of social distancing and detection of illness for employees, despite warnings from health researchers . Several other states, including Colorado, Oklahoma, and Montana, have taken similar steps toward reopening.
Gates said that when planning phased reopens, states should focus on “high-value” segments of the economy, such as schools, manufacturing and construction, and should discover how to operate those sectors with masks and social distancing. Once some schools and businesses return to work, communities must continue to track the effects on infection rates.
But it will take time.
“Inequality has increased in education, so if we can figure out how to open elementary and middle schools in the fall, it would be nice,” said Gates. “I even think that if we are creative and things have gone well, we can get to college.”
The case for continuous prevention measures
Careful planning to control the virus is crucial because it will probably still be a year or two before a coronavirus vaccine is developed and ready for large-scale production, Gates said. The Trump administration has estimated that a vaccine will be ready in 12 to 18 months, although some leaders in the field say that schedule may be too fast.
Although some have suggested speeding up the production of vaccines before one has been approved, Gates said the “stage 3” trial of whether a drug could have harmful side effects will take time.
“It is very difficult to compress these deadlines,” he said.
Gates also commented on the conspiracy theories that accused him of capitalizing on the pandemic. He called the allegations ironic, after his foundation has spent decades funding and leading research to understand and protect against dangerous diseases, although he said he does not think a “significant” number of people believe them.
He said, however, that he wishes he had made more people understand the threat posed by the coronavirus earlier.
“I always think, how could I have sent the message in a stronger way? Where did I fall short? ”He said. “Only 5% of what should have been done was done.”
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