Here are two questions that Bill Gates had answered on Reddit today:
Why do you think the world was utterly unprepared for Covid?
Infectious disease in rich countries isn’t the big problem it used to be. For things like fire and earthquakes we have small ones to remind us of the problem. A pandemic that gets into Europe or the US only comes along rarely so it is easy to not practice and not have dedicated resources. A few countries like Australia did a better job and have 10% of the deaths of most rich countries.
Why is the COVID-19 model behaving very differently in America as compared to other countries? With state-of-the-art vaccines and close to 70% of people fully vaccinated, the cases are always rising after dipping for a few days. Looking at the statistics of the number of people catching COVID and the number of people dying due to it, seemed like this was to end by January / February. The model is quite weird.
The new variants come along and evade immunity from vaccination and infection. Also immunity wanes fairly quickly in the elderly. When the cases are high people do change their behavior and when they are low they go back to normal behavior. So you get huge ups and downs in the case rate driven by seasons, variants and people’s behavior. Fortunately Omicron is less fatal than previous variants.