Bill Gates: Trump's plan to reopen the country 'will not work'

From the March 26 edition of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360”:

BILL GATES: So, we’re entering into a tough period that if we do it right, we’ll only have to do it once for 6-10 weeks. But we have to do it — it has to be the whole country, we have to raise the level of testing, and the prioritization of that testing quite dramatically in order to make sure we go through one shutdown so that we take the medical problem and really stop it before there’s a large number of deaths.

 

We do then get an economic problem, which is why you want to minimize the amount of time, and having states go at different things or thinking you can do it county by county, that will not work.

 

The cases will be exponentially growing anywhere you don’t have a serious shutdown.

 

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: So even in — cause folks, look — people who want, sort of, county by county, or say, you know, let’s get back online faster, say, well look, in some states there is less than 200 cases; in many states, there’s less than 200 cases right now.

 

You’re saying that even in those states, the same kind of shutdown needs to occur?

 

GATES: Well, let’s say you have a hundred cases, and let’s say you don’t do a shutdown. Then it grows 33% per day. So, you take a 100, you get 1,000, you get 10,000 — it’s exponential growth if you’re not stopping it.

 

The sooner you engage in the shutdown the easier it is to get to that peak. We have not peaked. The parts of the country that aren’t shut down by the – in late April, we should start to see the numbers peak there. They’ll still be too high to open up, so you’ll probably have to go another month to really get those numbers down.

 

But any part of the country that has cases — and truthfully because of our problems with testing, because we’re not prioritizing testing the right way, a lot of those places actually do have cases. But even if they have the hundred that will grow, and people do cross-county boundaries, and so basically the whole country needs to do what was done in the part of China where they had these infections.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.