The virus causes a disease known as COVID-19 and has killed nearly 2,900 people and infected more than 83,000 others worldwide since December. The vast majority of cases and deaths have occurred in China
US billionaire and software developer Bill Gates said the coronavirus was beginning to behave as “the pathogen we have worried about over the century,” and called the epidemic a pandemic.
Gates, who has warned for years that the world is not ready for a deadly pandemic, wrote Friday in an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine that COVID-19 poses a serious threat to the world because there are many more deadly and contagious than many other deadly viruses.
“Over the past week, COVID-19 has started to behave in the same way as the pathogen that concerned us over the century,” wrote Gates. “I hope it’s not as bad, but we have to assume it will be until we know the opposite. “
He said the current death rate from COVID-19 is higher than that of the 1957 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 66,000 people in the United States.
“First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to the elderly with health problems,” he wrote. “Second, Covid-19 is transmitted fairly effectively. The infected person spreads the disease on average to two or three other people – an exponential rate of increase. “
The death rate is “much higher than that of the typical seasonal flu,” said Gates. Gates urged world leaders to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus, calling on developed countries to help less developed countries fight the virus.
He suggested that wealthy countries should provide low and middle income countries in Africa and South Asia with skilled health workers to monitor the spread of COVID-19 and find vaccines.
He pointed out that many low- and middle-income countries “health systems are already weak, and a pathogen like the coronavirus can quickly overwhelm them.”
Earlier this month, Gates warned that the coronavirus epidemic could overwhelm health services in Africa and trigger a pandemic that could cause 10 million deaths on the continent.
The founder and philanthropist of Microsoft spoke at the annual meeting of an American scientific society in Seattle, Washington, amid growing concerns about the coronavirus epidemic.
It is now feared that the disease will spread to sub-Saharan Africa where it could trigger an uncontrollable epidemic, as health services are unable to monitor or control the virus.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable foundation he and his wife, Melinda Gates, created in 2000, recently committed $ 100 million to fight the coronavirus.
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