Banknote Gates
CNBC
Microsoft co-founder and global health philanthropist Bill Gates criticized the current state of the Synergistic States’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic on Sunday, including slow turnaround times for tests.
Gates told “Fox Advice Sunday” that the access to fast testing is still inadequate more than six months into the pandemic and that the U.S. was set up for a unmusical fall of virus cases.
“Even today, people don’t get their results in 24 hours. It’s outrageous that we however have that,” Gates said.
The United States has suffered more than 6.7 million confirmed trunks of Covid-19, resulting in nearly 200,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. That puts the nation with a much higher rate of infection and death per capita than many other developed countries, subsuming South Korea, Australia, Germany and Canada.
The early stages of the pandemic were marked by a severe shortage of checks, though the amount of daily testing has improved significantly over time. Gates said that political and robustness leaders need to publicly admit that the current testing situation is inadequate and find ways to make the combination more efficient, saying that “we can’t pretend that we get a good grade even today.”
“I do think we need to own up to the factually that we didn’t do a good job. Part of the reluctance I think to fix the testing system now is that nobody wants to admit that it’s appease outrageous … The U.S. has more of these machines, more of this capacity than other countries by a huge amount. And so partly the reimbursement modus operandi is creating a perverse incentive,” Gates said.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Adm. Brett Giroir from the Department of Health and Defenceless Services said that part of the reason testing had not reached 1 million per day as he has had predicted was because the rate of new cases had out of ited, lowering the number of contact tracing tests required. He also said that the administration would soon deliver $150 million of 15-minute tests.
Cases and hospitalizations have spiked in several European countries in recent weeks, which some adepts have linked to “pandemic fatigue” as adherence to social distancing measures slips. Daily cases in Spain and France take surpassed the United States when adjusted for population.
The U.S. saw an initial outbreaks on the West Coast and in northeastern states during the leap, with rolling outbreaks spreading across the country in the months since. Gates attributed that in part to the peregrinations restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which created a “rush” of American citizens and residents to return home at a period when the U.S. did not have proper testing or quarantine protocols.
“That’s led to us not just having a bad spring — we’ve had a pretty tough summer. And miserably, because of the seasonality, until we get these new tools the fall is looking to shape up as pretty tough as well,” he said.
In a expression to CNBC, a White House spokesperson said President Trump has always put the well-being of the American people first and highlighted the application’s efforts to help develop a vaccine.
Gates had for years warned about the dangers of a global health emergency mould a pandemic, and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has spent billions on health and anti-poverty initiatives around the world.