Billionaire Bill Gates has warned that Covid pandemic is far from over, with the worst remaining yet to unfold.
Stressing on the need for increasing global surveillance, the Microsoft founder and
philanthropist warned of the likelihood of an even more fatal and transmissive variant of Covid, the Financial Times reported.
Gates stated that even though he does not want to sound gloomy, yet the risk of a more virulent variant is more than 5 per cent. “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal,” he was quoted as saying.
“It’s not likely, I don’t want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it,” he added.
This is not the first time that Gates warned of a potential global threat posed by viruses.
In 2015, he first cautioned publicly that the “world was not ready for the inevitable next pandemic” and that viruses, not war, pose the greatest risk of “global catastrophe”.