Bill Gates predicts the US will be ‘back to normal’ by the end of 2021

Bill Gates has said he is ‘optimistic the pandemic won’t last indefinitely’ and predicts the United States will be ‘back to normal’ by the end of 2021. 

The billionaire, a longtime philanthropist on issues of global healthcare and poverty, told Fox News host Chris Wallace in an Interview airing Sunday: ‘If a vaccine approval comes by early next year as I expect, then by next summer the U.S. will be starting to go back to normal and by the end of the year our activities can be fairly normal.’

America on Sunday neared 200,000 deaths from coronavirus with the University of Washington predicting the number of fatalities will nearly double by January. The virus continues to spread and there is currently no approved vaccine.

But Gates added: ‘You know, thank goodness vaccine technology was there, the funding came up, that the companies put their best people on it. That’s why I’m optimistic this won’t last indefinitely.’

His foundation, set up alongside wife Melinda, has so far committed $650 million to fight COVID-19. 

Gates added: ‘Of course, we are going to give more, by the time we get organized, it’ll be a billion dollars.

‘The end of the epidemic best case is 2022 but during 2021, the numbers we should drive them down if we take the global approach.’  

In May the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at University of Washington estimated around 180,000 deaths by October. Their prediction now stands at around 378,000 deaths by January. 

Speaking about America’s response to the virus Gates told Fox News: ‘ Unfortunately we did a very poor job.’ 

Gates said Donald Trump’s pandemic travel bans actually worsened the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. by prompting a stampede of Americans returning from overseas. 

He added: ‘We need to own up to the fact that we didn’t do a good job.’  

‘We created this rush, and we didn’t have the ability to test or quarantine those people, and so that seeded the disease here,’ Gates told Chris Wallace in an interview clip released on Friday.

‘The ban probably accelerated that because of the way it was executed,’ Gates continued.

Wallace pressed Gates to explain further, and the software billionaire continued: ‘March saw this incredible explosion, the West Coast coming from China, and the East Coast coming out of Europe.’  

In response to the international crisis, Trump banned travel to the U.S. from China on January 31, and from continental Europe on March 11, adding the UK soon after.

The president has frequently pointed to the travel bans as evidence of his swift action in the face of the pandemic, saying that he imposed the China ban even as his advisers hesitated and his critics decried the move as racist and xenophobic.

Gates earlier this week issued a report saying the coronavirus pandemic has wiped out progress on lofty goals such as ending world poverty and hunger in the next decade.  

The report outlines ways in which COVID-19 has wreaked economic damage and derailed progress on many of the global development goals adopted by the United Nations five years ago.

‘The COVID-19 pandemic not only stopped progress, it kicked it backward,’ said Gates, who co-founded Microsoft Corp, in a conference call with reporters. He and his wife Melinda set up the philanthropic foundation in 2000. 

In the coming days, the number of U.S. deaths is set to clear the outer band of the president´s projections: 200,000, according to the official tally, though the real number is certainly higher. The virus has infected more than 6.7 million Americans. 

The US also set a one-day record with over 1 million coronavirus diagnostic tests being performed, but the country needs 6 million to 10 million a day to bring outbreaks under control, according to various experts. 

Some public health experts fear infections could spike this fall and winter, perhaps even doubling the death count by the end of the year.