The billionaire philanthropist made the prediction on Thursday during an interview in Poland. He said that had some ‘investments’ been made early on by the international community, the scale of the pandemic could have been avoided. Gates added that while some countries successfully contained the virus, others failed. ‘Sadly, most of Europe, South America and the US did not so we suffered an incredible problem,’ he said.
‘For a small cost, a level of investment, we could avoid this problem,’ Gates said. He was promoting his book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, which is published by Simon & Shuster. ‘We can measure the economic cost but we probably can’t even measure the loss of learning, the suffering from the restrictions that we’ve had to put in place, to keep the deaths from being even higher,’ said the philanthropist, who called the crisis ‘an incredible tragedy’
The numbers got very, very large. And even the trade offs, how we handled it, were very difficult.