On Thursday, March 19th, Bill Gates published on his website Gates Notes a super helpful Question & Answer session that he had on Reddit on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He answered 31 questions that people had for him. Here are some of the highlights that we took to heart after reading his post.
Wash your hands with soap often & don’t touch your face!
Respect social distancing (i.e., the “shut-down”) — it will help and is the best thing we have to help prevent overwhelming our hospitals beyond their capacity. (However, because of the epic failure of the U.S. SARS-CoV-2 testing system, hospitals are preparing now for going beyond their surge capacity that will start occuring in the first two weeks in April. This is going to be a terribly difficult time.)
The lack of SARS-CoV-2 testing and organization of testing in the U.S. has made the negative impacts on our society and economy much worse than it needed to be. If we did this amazingly well early-on (like South Korea or back in Dec 2019 when the outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, China), we would be nowhere close to the awful depths of where we’re currently at. This is a huge failure of our government and leaders who are responsible for pandemic preparedness.
A safe & effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (which will take about 1 year from now before its possible to administer widely to people, if the research & development goes well) is one of the most powerful solutions to overcoming this pandemic and moving on as a civilization.
Take models and projections of timeframe and # of infections/cases with a grain of salt at this time — we just don’t have good data yet to parameterize these models well.
This hellish experience will whip us in shape and we’ll be much better prepared for the next pandemic that comes our way.
