Bill Gates Calls For National Tracking System For Coronavirus

(Forbes) – A week after stepping down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the second-richest person in the world with a net worth $97.8 billion, took to Reddit for an Ask Me Anything on the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, sharing his thoughts on how best to deal with the outbreak and its possible long-term effects on the world.

A TED Talk by Gates from 2015 recently emerged called “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” given during the Ebola epidemic, but as the White House administration faces criticism for not reacting quickly enough, Gates reiterated that, “We did know it would happen at some point, either with the flu or some other respiratory virus…There was almost no funding.”

Following the eventual end of the pandemic, Gates hopes that countries can work together to better prepare for similar situations, including the “need to have the ability to scale up diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines very rapidly…the technologies exist to do this well if the right investments are made”; the $100 million his and his wife Melinda’s Gates Foundation donated to fight the coronavirus is focused on those three areas. -Full Report