Bill Gates said the United States will see far fewer than the White House forecast of between 100,000 and 240,000 coronavirus-related deaths if U.S. citizens stay home.
“If we do the social distancing properly, we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of that,” the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder told Fox News Sunday.
“But I do think if we get the testing fixed, we get all 50 states involved, we’ll be below that,” he added.
At a briefing on the coronavirus last week, President Trump said the U.S. could see hundreds of thousands of deaths from the coronavirus. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been sharing the same estimate.
As of Sunday, there were more than 312,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Of those, more than 8,500 people have died from the virus, and at least 15,000 people have recovered.
Gates called the situation “a nightmare scenario” but said those numbers could level off by the end of April if people follow the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’ve got to use quarantine, which is an old thing back from the days of the plague as our primary tool. Fortunately, if we use that well enough, we should, towards the end of this month, start to see those numbers level off. And then if we continue country-wide, and we’re testing the right people to understand what’s going on, which is not the case yet, those numbers will start to go down. And then we can look at some degree of opening back up,” he said.
