Gates Package — page 888

<~?~Commence Introduction> Introduction I was having dinner on Valentine's Day 2020 when I realized that COVID-19 would become a global disaster. For several weeks, I had been talking with experts at the Gates Foundation about a new respiratory disease that was circulating in China. We're lucky to have a team of world-class people with decades of experience in tracking, treating, and preventing infectious diseases, and they were following COVID-19 closely. We had already committed several million dollars in grants to help keep the virus out of Africa, where it could devastate countries that were already struggling. Our working assumption was: We hope this virus won't go global, but we have to assume it will until we know otherwise. At that point, there was still reason to believe that the virus could be contained within China. The government had taken unprecedented safety measures to lock down Wuhan--schools and public places were closed and citizens were issued permission cards that allowed them to leave their home every other day for thirty minutes at a time.1 And the virus was still limited enough that countries were letting people travel freely. I had flown to South Africa in early February for a charity tennis match. When I got back from South Africa, it had been a few weeks since we'd had an in-depth conversation about COVID at the foundation. There was one central question I could not stop thinking about and wanted to explore at length: Was I right to hope that COVID-19 could be contained, or would it go global?