[ExI] Bill Gates new talk on COVID-19

[John Clark]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 4:08 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

Month of February was wasted <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo>

>
> > *I have to admit that I was too bored to finish.*
>
> *What should I be taking from this?SR Ballard*


I admire Bill Gates for many reasons, one of them is that no human being
has saved more lives than he has. And few people have thought longer or
more deeply about global pandemics than he has. You really should watch the
entire talk but if you insist on the Cliff Notes version here are some Bill
Gates quotations from his recent talk:

*“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic.
Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But
money, you know bringing the economy back and doing money, that’s more of a
reversible thing than bringing people back to life. And so we’re going to
take the pain in the economic dimension — huge pain — in order to minimize
the pain in the disease and death dimension. It’s very irresponsible for
somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds. There is no
middle course on this thing." *

*"It’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey keep going to restaurants, go buy
new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner, we want you to
keep spending because there’s some politician that thinks GDP growth is
what counts. It’s hard to tell people during and epidemic … that they
should go about things knowing their activity is spreading this disease"*

*"Many countries had not taken advantage of the month of February.  South
Korea’s approach to mass testing was a lesson everyone should learn from.
South Korea took advantage of February, built up the testing capacity and
they were able to contact trace, and the infections have gone down even
without the type of shutdown that, because we’re late, we’re having to do.”*

*“The problem wasn’t that there was a system that didn’t work well enough.
The problem was that we didn’t have a system at all. It’s too late to avoid
a coronavirus shutdown. The U.S. is past this opportunity to control the
coronavirus without shutdown. We did not act fast enough to have an ability
to avoid the shutdown. It’s disastrous for the economy, but the sooner you
do it in a tough way, the sooner you can undo it and go back to normal"*

*"**China is seeing very few cases now because their testing and shut down
was very effective. If a country does a good job with testing and shut down
then within 6-10 weeks they should see very few cases and be able to open
back up."*

 *“If you’re doing isolation well nationally, within about 20 days you’ll
see those numbers of new cases really change, i.e., go down, …and that is a
sign that you’re on your way.  **This is not going to be easy. We need a
clear message about that.”*

John K Clark
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