V In a series of Twitter posts late Tuesday, billionaire Bill Gates said he planned to cancel most of his Christmas plans and warned that the United States “could be at the worst of the pandemic.”
Claiming that the Omicron variant is spreading faster than any virus in history, the Microsoft co-founder said
It remains to be seen how severe this variant of COVID-19 can be.
Just when it seemed like life would return to normal, we could be entering the worst part of the pandemic. Omicron will hit home for all of us. Close friends of mine now have it, and I’ve canceled most of my holiday plans.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) December 21, 2021
“We have to take it very seriously until we learn more about it. “Even if it’s half as severe as Delta, it’s going to be the worst outbreak we’ve ever seen because it’s so contagious,” Gates wrote.
He also expects this wave of COVID-19 to last three months in the United States. “These few months may be bad, but I still believe that if we take the right steps, the pandemic could end in 2022,” he said.
Omicron is spreading faster than any virus in history. It will soon be in every country in the world.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) December 21, 2021
The incidence of COVID-19 in the United States is increasing:
the country registered an average of more than 148,000 new cases a day in the past week, up 23 percent from a week ago and back to levels last seen in mid-September, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates is trying to bridge the gap in access to vaccines, noting that far fewer people in low-income countries have been vaccinated against COVID-19. He said in a CNN publication in October that the difference would be harder to bridge as richer governments around the world buy additional doses to use as boosters.
The big unknown is how sick omicron makes you. We need to take it seriously until we know more about it. Even if it’s only half as severe as delta, it will be the worst surge we have seen so far because it’s so infectious.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) December 21, 2021
“People have a right to be upset by injustice in this regard.”,
Gates writes. Vaccines make COVID-19 a largely preventable disease – and survivable in all but the rarest of cases – and it is heartbreaking to know that people die from disease not because it cannot be stopped, but because they live in poorer country ‘.
