The Microsoft billionaire said he did not want it to be “the whole disaster and depression” but that there was “a five per cent risk” the pandemic would worsen and urged world leaders to spend more to raise preparedness for health threats. . Mr Gates has long warned of the global threat posed by viruses. He had previously given a speech in 2015 arguing that the world was “not ready for the next epidemic” and that viruses, not war, pose the greatest risk of “global catastrophe”. The philanthropist told the Financial Times: “We are still in danger of this pandemic creating a variant that would be even more contagious and even more deadly. “It’s not possible, I do not want to be the voice of destruction and gloom, but this pandemic is well above the 5 percent risk, we have not seen even the worst.” The philanthropist also invited a team of experts, costing about $ 1 billion, to be managed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to detect and prevent future pandemics. He said: “The amount of money involved is very small compared to the benefit and it will be a test: can the world institutions take on new responsibilities in a great way, even at a time when the US-China [relations are] tough, is the US-Russia extremely tough? ‘ It comes as WHO Director-General Dr. Tentros Antanom Gebregesus urged countries to maintain surveillance for coronavirus infections, saying people were “blind” to how the virus was spreading due to falling test rates. “As many countries reduce their testing, the WHO is receiving less and less information about transmission and sequencing,” he told a news conference at the UN headquarters in Geneva. “This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution.” Bill Rodriguez, chief executive of FIND, a global aid team working with the WHO to expand access to testing, said “test rates have plummeted by 70 to 90 percent”. “We have an unprecedented ability to know what is going on. “And today, because the trials were the first victim of a global decision to let go of our vigilance, we are becoming blind to what is happening with this virus.” In other developments, an analysis of data from 50 studies showed that almost half of people recovering from coronavirus still have post-Covid conditions.
