Corona only "seasonal flu"?
Bill Gates dares to predict the end of the pandemic
Created: 01/13/2022, 1:41 PM
By: Marc Dimitriu
Bill Gates predicts the end of the corona pandemic.
© Gian Ehrenzeller / KEYSTONE / dpa
Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicts when the corona pandemic could be over.
In his opinion, Omikron played a major role in this.
Munich - At the end of 2021, the mood at billionaire Bill Gates was still gloomy due to the Omikron variant.
At that time he predicted an extremely strong wave, many friends of his would have already had the variant.
Even then, he canceled all vacation plans: “Omikron is spreading faster than any virus in history.
It will be in every country on earth quickly ”.
Corona: Bill Gates believes that Omicron brings about an endemic situation
And that's exactly how it happened: Omikron ensures unprecedented numbers of infections in numerous countries.
Fortunately, more and more studies show that the Omicron variant is usually milder than Delta.
Hospitalization in severely affected countries was also not as high as feared.
Now the Microsoft founder spoke again about the corona pandemic.
In a question and answer session for
Global Health Governance
, he was also asked to
When the pandemic ended.
According to him, it will vary from country to country.
However, he assumes that as soon as the Omikron wave rushed through a country, there will be significantly fewer new infections over the course of the year.
In the affected countries, the coronavirus can then be treated like "seasonal flu", said Gates.
He shared the same forecast again on Twitter.
Corona: Even experts are cautiously optimistic - Omikron could be an “exit wave”
How much trust should be placed in such predictions by Bill Gates, however, is questionable.
The billionaire has been fighting for one with his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for years
Worldwide improvement of health care and thus also drove the Covax initiative, which is part of the World Health Organization (WHO) and which advocates a fair global distribution of corona vaccines. So he deals a lot with the topic and has contact with experts, but he is not a virologist or epidemiologist himself and therefore just as little an expert as most of us.
However, many scientists also see signs of an end to the pandemic and the transition to an endemic situation due to the more spreading but milder omicron variant.
The chief virologist at the Berlin Charité, Christian Drosten, was cautiously optimistic about the possible development of a pandemic.
Looking at data from South Africa, where Omikron first raged, Drosten said on ZDF “Heute Journal”: “In a way, that can calm us down.” The virologist Isabella Eckerle from the University of Geneva recently wrote on Twitter that Omikron could “ours Exit wave & the 'ticket' to the endemic situation ”.
(md)
