Billionaire Bill Gates, who co-founded the Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest personal-computer software company, has warned there is a chance that the world has not yet seen the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We're still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal. It's not likely, I don't want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it's way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven't even seen the worst of it”, the tech mogul and philanthropist was quoted by the Financial Times as saying.
Gates, who is releasing his new book, "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic" on 3 May, has also advised governments across the world to invest in epidemiologists and computer modellers to help identify global health threats.
According to him, besides global surveillance to spot pandemic dangers, increased spending is needed to improve preparedness for health threats.
Gates dubbed his plan the "Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization" initiative, and suggested that only the World health Organisation (WHO) was capable of building and managing a “top-notch” team of experts, with funding worth an estimated $1 billion a year.
He also denounced the current WHO funding model as “not at all serious about pandemics”.
Gates, an active participant in the global effort to distribute COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines with his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation working with the US-chaired Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator and the COVAX facility, recently wrote an opinion piece published by The New York Times where he suggested that the coronavirus pandemic would not have claimed such a toll if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner.
“The death rates are likely to have been far lower, and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did", Gates wrote.
Since March 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has killed an estimated 6.2 million people worldwide. Despite the fact that case numbers, hospitalisation, and deaths have been winding down around the world, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), this week warned that people still need to be wary of the respiratory disease.
During a press conference on 26 April, the WHO director-general warned that decreases in overall testing and COVID-19 surveillance in many countries would leave the world at risk of a resurgence of the virus.