Bill Gates AMA: 31 questions and answers about Covid-19

gatesnotes.com

37 points·soheilpro··4 comments

I'm distracted by how he skirts around so many questions. Especially in the second half. Not sure he means to. I think it's just something people do. I really want to know the actual answer to this. Won't they just have to shut everything down again?

Q: But when they open back up is not like starting over? The total number of cured vs those who can still be infected is still small.

A: The goal is to keep the number infected to a small percentage. In China less than .01% of the population was infected because of the measures they took. Most rich countries should be able to achieve a low level of infections. Some developing countries will not be able to do that.

I think Bill is answering in such a way to be politically neutral. Other questions he has in his post here read as if they are politically biased and well to be honest, in this global pandemic there shouldn't really be any political tension.

My understanding is that it is expected that we may have to reimplement varying levels of social distancing multiple times, in waves to keep hospital load manageable.

But as the population slowly gains immunity, the rate of spread will start to drop off drastically due to herd immunity.

This was a good, quick read, but... TLDR; Social distancing and organized testing (as well as more testing) are required, but neither have yet been well implemented in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com