Billionaire founder of Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates said that covid deaths and infection rates may dip below seasonal flu levels by the middle of next year, provided new dangerous variants don’t emerge in the meantime.
Bill Gates was speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Thursday.
Between natural and vaccine immunity and emerging oral treatments, “the death rate and the disease rate ought to be coming down pretty dramatically,” he said.
According to Gates, the constraints on vaccinating the world against Covid-19 will shift next year, as supply issues are resolved and replaced by questions of how to logistically distribute them all.
“The vaccines are very good news, and the supply constraints will be largely solved as we get out in the middle of next year, and so we’ll be limited by the logistics and the demand,” Gates said in a virtual interview.
He however says it is not clear what the demand level will be in a lot of countries, especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa. He further added that the world needs to work to eradicate the flu as well in order to reduce threats from future pandemics.
The New Economy Forum is being organized by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.
