Bill Gates says US not even close to doing enough to tackle coronavirus

Philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder says American actions were ‘embarrassing’

Bill Gates has condemned American actions over Covid-19 and dubbed the current situation as “more bleak” than he would have believed.

As American coronavirus deaths surpassed 125,000 on Thursday, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder admitted he was “still pretty disappointed” with Donald Trump amid the pandemic.

“The US in particular hasn’t had the leadership messages or coordination that you would have expected,” he told CNN on Thursday night. “I’m still pretty disappointed.”

Mr Gates, who dubbed US actions as burdensome, told CNN that the US was “not even close” to managing the pandemic.

“It’s possible to ramp up testing for a new pathogen very, very fast,” said Mr Gates. “In fact a number of countries did that extremely well in this case and the technology keeps getting better there.”

Mr Gates also blamed American deaths on un-targeted mass-testing, which he said was a “scarce resource”.

“No other country has relied on that. What other countries are doing is: they’re restraining their behaviour, including using masks better than us, but they’re also quarantining when they test positive and they’re doing contact tracing.”

He added that whilst some US states were “serious” about contact tracing, “because our behaviour and our contact tracing is not working well, we continue to have very large case-spread.”

“It is embarrassing,” added Mr Gates, who said he was disappointed that developing nations such as Brazil and India had been burdened with American inaction amid the pandemic.

“Without US leadership, it’s been hard to pull together a response, and now the developing countries are bearing the brunt of the burden.”

At the same, he said the US could still “step up” with the worldwide need for a vaccine to manage Covid-19.

Those comments come after the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested on Thursday that 20 million Americans could have contracted the virus – more than 10 times the current total.