Five Things We Learned From a New Bill Gates Interview on Coronavirus

It was almost exactly five years ago when Bill Gates gave a TED Talk called “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready.”

And everything in the last few months of COVID-19 has pretty much followed what the Microsoft founder described.

So now we’re really listening. And during a new interview with Vanessa Kortekaas of the Financial Times, Gates — the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is allocating billions to find a potential vaccine — laid out a series of concerns, investment plans and even a path to normalcy.

Some highlights:

Not enough was done

“Some work was done,” Gates admits, alluding to certain investment and governments who created platforms to produce vaccines faster than they used to. “But the whole point of [my original] speech was to drive the research and the planning and the simulation which would have allowed us to stop this at a very early stage.”

Nobody reacted perfectly … except maybe one country

“Taiwan comes close [to a perfect record],” says Gates, who notes it’s a shame that the country wasn’t a part of WHO. Gates also gives some credit to countries that undergone fairly recent pandemics, including South Korea (and even China).

Testing isn’t enough

“Testing is what guides you to do more social isolation,” says Gates. “But it can’t just be numbers of tests. You have to have results 24 hours and prioritize who gets tests.” He also gives credit to South Korea for developing a unified system of testing. “The U.S. doesn’t have a criteria and there are testing backlogs,” he notes. What you want, he says, is a PCR test that’s sensitive enough to accurately test you before you have symptoms.

There is room for hope

“We will get a vaccine,” says Gates. “And the goal of our foundation is that everyone will get one. Hopefully in 18 months.”

The economy will take a huge hit. But it’s not permanent.

“Economies can come back, but deaths you can’t reverse… You don’t have a choice.” And a warning for the impatient in first-world countries: “In rich countries, you will be able to open up if things are done well. Normalcy only returns when we vaccinate the global population.”

And while Gates laments that the response shouldn’t have required a many trillions of dollars of loss, he notes that we’ve now “been whacked on the head” and that some of the medical work now could help in other, non-pandemic areas of medicine.

Most importantly? We’re gonna get through this. “The science is there,” he says. “People will step forward.”

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