‘ACUTE PHASE’ OF CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC WILL END IN 2022, BILL GATES SAYS

Thu 09 December 2021:

The “acute phase” of the Covid-19 pandemic will end in 2022, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates has predicted on his blog, also deeming the rise of the Omicron variant “concerning.”

The billionaire suggested in a post to his GatesNotes blog that, “It might be foolish to make another prediction, but I think the acute phase of the pandemic will come to a close sometime in 2022,”

Gates said the omicron variant is “concerning” but health researchers are urgently working to learn more about it, and the world will have more information, such as the effectiveness of vaccines and previous infections.

“It’s troubling any time a new variant of concern emerges, but I’m still hopeful that, at some point next year, COVID-19 will become an endemic disease in most places,” he wrote. “Although it is currently about 10 times more lethal than flu, vaccines and antivirals could cut that number by half or more.”

The tech mogul acknowledged that despite the rollout and mass uptake of Covid-19 vaccines around the world, more people had died with the virus in 2021 than in 2020, adding that the improvement in the pandemic situation this year had not been as “dramatic” as he’d hoped.

Gates called the emergence of the Omicron variant of the virus “concerning,” but said the world is “better prepared to tackle potentially bad variants” than it previously was. The South African scientists who discovered the Omicron variant have mostly suggested the symptoms are mild and not a huge cause for concern.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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