Melinda Gates gave the Trump administration a near-failing grade on its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Gates, a philanthropist and wife to Bill Gates, told Politico the Trump administration deserves a “D-minus” grade for its response to the coronavirus, while praising the response from countries such as Germany. She commended the steps taken by some governors but said the federal government should be calling the shots.
“We need leadership at the national level. We’ve lost two months, almost, now in terms of our national response. We have governors who are stepping up, luckily, but now we have 50 different homegrown state solutions instead of a national response,” Gates said.
“If we were doing the things that the exemplar countries are doing, like Germany, we would be testing. We would be testing first healthcare workers, and then the most vulnerable, and you’d be doing contact tracing. And we would be able to start thinking about slowly, slowly, reopening places in society in safe and healthy ways, but we have a lack of a coordinated effort,” she said. “That’s just the truth across the United States.”
Melinda Gates gives the administration a “D-minus” grade for its handling of the outbreak, citing a lack of a coordinated, national response. More from our interview with one of the world’s most active public health advocates on the Women Rule podcast ? https://t.co/pWWiP3gIHp pic.twitter.com/5VzKG5TRjB
— POLITICO (@politico) May 8, 2020
Germany has had nearly 170,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 7,404 related deaths. The U.S. has had 1.27 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and 76,368 related deaths.
Germany’s death rate is significantly lower than other countries around the world, in part because the average age of those infected is lower than in other countries. The country also developed its own testing and tracking system very early in the pandemic. In Germany, the coronavirus had a fatality rate of 1.6%, while Italy had a fatality rate of 12%. France, Spain, and the United Kingdom had fatality rates of 10%. The U.S. has a fatality rate of 3%.
Bill Gates has also criticized the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. While the Trump administration has condemned China for its actions at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Gates has called that a “distraction.”
“You know, some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place, and they avoided the incredible economic pain. It’s sad that even the U.S., that you would have expected to do this well, did it particularly poorly. But it’s not time to talk about that,” Gates said.
