Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates criticized US coronavirus testing, saying it has to be more available and able to produce results faster.
At The Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, the global health philanthropist said that the lockdowns in some countries helped them manage coronavirus outbreaks, but such shutdowns “would be hard to execute in most countries.” However, Gates pointed out that unlike US coronavirus testing, other nations were able to conduct testing to address outbreaks.
“Other countries did very good testing early on. They activated the commercial sector,” he stressed. “The U.S., to this day, has that you don’t get quick test results. It’s truly a sad thing that we haven’t organized testing.”
Gates said that the US government and commercial laboratories have not yet improved the processing time of testing. Public health specialists stress that the value of a test declines the longer it takes to produce results to the potentially infectious patient.
Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary at HHS who manages the US testing effort, explains that Covid-19 testing alone is not a program that can resolve the outbreak. However, testing advocates believe that access to quick tests would allow people to isolate if they find out they are positive, thus reducing chains of transmission.
According to Gates, investing in more and rapid testing can help control the virus without damaging the economy as lockdowns do.
“The U.S. never did a lockdown. And China proved that if you do an effective lockdown, you can drive disease to zero,” he noted. “It was extreme. It’d be hard to execute in most countries, but they got to zero.”
“People are so tired of being restricted,” he said. “And the clarity of leadership about, ‘hey, this saves lives,’ has been particularly weak in the U.S. and a few other countries. Even what we do know about things that we shouldn’t be doing, particularly as the fall is going to drive the numbers up quite a bit, we’re not able to execute on that," he added.
Moreover, Gates said that countries like South Korea and Australia were able to bring the coronavirus outbreaks under control. He said these nations had experience responding to the SARS outbreak in 2002 and thus were better prepared to manage another pandemic.
“Because this is an exponential event, a little bit of intelligence early on, makes a huge difference,” he noted. “I do think this time we’ll learn and we’ll have innovations so the next time this happens, we’ll do better, but we’re still dealing with the mistakes of February and March.”
In his interview on “Fox News Sunday" in September, Gates mentioned the lack of efficient Covid-19 tests more than six months into the pandemic.
He added that the system can be more efficient through new ways, adding that “we can’t pretend that we get a good grade even today.”
“I do think we need to own up to the fact that we didn’t do a good job. Part of the reluctance I think to fix the testing system now is that nobody wants to admit that it’s still outrageous … The U.S. has more of these machines, more of this capacity than other countries by a huge amount. And so partly the reimbursement system is creating a perverse incentive,” Gates said.
