MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Gates: “we ain't seen the worst of covid-19 yet”

“If we make the right decisions and investments, we can make COVID-19 the last pandemic,” Gates forecast.

Tycoon Bill Gates said Monday said that the worst part of the coronavirus crisis was yet to be seen, although most countries are returning to prepandemic dispositions.

“We still run the risk that this pandemic will generate a variant that is even more transmissible and more deadly,” Gates told the Financial Times. However, in his forthcoming book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, he says he is optimistic that the coronavirus may be “the last pandemic.”

“It's not likely, I don't want to be a doomsday voice, but it's well above the 5% risk that this pandemic, we haven't even seen the worst,” he added.

A longtime advocate of pandemic preparedness, Gates warned in a TED talk that the world was “not prepared” for such a situation and noted that longer-lasting COVID-19 vaccines that can block infection were needed.

Gates suggested to the Financial Times the creation of a task force to oversee global health emergencies, as the World Health Organization (WHO) currently has “less than 10 full-time people” searching for new deadly viruses. He also considered that the epidemic response team could be made up of experts that include computer experts as well as epidemiologists.

In his book, the businessman wrote that COVID-19 had made it clear “that the world must prioritize the elimination of pandemics as a threat to humanity.”

“If we make the right decisions and investments, we can make COVID-19 the last pandemic,” he forecast. “I have been following Covid since the early days of the outbreak, working with experts inside and outside the Gates Foundation who advocate for a more equitable response and who have been fighting infectious diseases for decades,” he also explained.

“I've learned a lot in the process, both about this pandemic and how to stop the next one, and I want to share what I've heard with people. So I started writing a book about how we can make sure no one suffers a pandemic ever again,” he added.

In line with the pursuit of normalcy, Argentina's Health Minister Carla Vizzotti has warned that amid the current favorable scenario and low level of contagion, a large part of society had “let their guard down” and not taken a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine, which is why the Government was launching an awareness campaign in the next few weeks.

“A peak of contagions or anything similar is not foreseen, but the arrival of winter may cause an increase in cases and we must be protected,” sources from the Health Ministry were quoted by TN as saying.

According to the latest data published in the Public Vaccination Monitor, 98,484,288 doses have already been administered, of which 40,706,434 correspond to first doses; 37,222,312 to second serums; 3,026,258 to additional doses, and 17,529,284 to boosters.

“We must continue to stimulate vaccination, despite the low-risk perception of the population,” Vizzotti has said.