American philanthropist Bill Gates called America’s testing process for the coronavirus “insanity” and noted that the nation is paying a “a pretty dramatic price” both in human death and wasted money in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, according to HuffPost.
Gates, who oversees worldwide public health initiative through his Gates Foundation, found fault with the inability to process coronavirus tests in a timely manner, which makes contact tracing and isolation practices ineffectual.
“You can’t get the federal government to improve the testing because they just want to say how great it is,” Gate said. “I’ve said to them, look, have a CDC website that prioritizes who gets tested. That’s trivial to do. They won’t pay attention to that. I’ve said don’t reimburse any tests where the result goes back after three days. You’re paying billions of dollars in this very inequitable way to get the most worthless test results of any country in the world.”
Gates also noted that European countries that saw massive spikes during the first wave of infections have “flattened the curve” from sparking a second wave by implementing national policies to halt the spread of the virus. The US, he says, pushed businesses to open too soon as a way to try to boost the economy.
“What’s impressive is that Italy, France, Spain ― who had a wave before us ― managed as they fell off to keep even the parts of the country that hadn’t had the intense epidemic from creating a second wave,” Gates said. “In the case of the United States, they opened up their bars. They didn’t do much in the way of wearing masks. And so those areas became this second wave,” he added.