On the Daily Show with Trevor Noah on Apirl 2, 2020, Bill Gates said:
There isn’t a choice, where you get to say to people ‘Don’t pay attention to this epidemic’. Most people, they have older relatives, they’re worried about getting sick. The idea of a normal economy, it’s not there as a choice. About 80% of people are going to change their activities. If you get the other 20% to go along with that, nation-wide, then the disease numbers will flatten, hopefully in the next month, and start to go down, hopefully, in the month after that. And then when they’ve gone down a lot, then in a tasteful way, using prioritized testing, you can start to re-open a lot of things like schools and work; probably not sports events because the chance of mass bread, there is, is quite large.
And so, to get back, economically taking the pain extremely now, and telling those who wouldn’t curb their activities, no, you must go along with the rest of society, and not associate in a way that we have exponential increase in these cases.
That is the right thing even though it’s extremely painful; it’s unheard of, and there are particular businesses that it’s catastrophic for. That’s the only way. So you can feel like you can say to the entire population, ideally in the early summer if things go well, yes, now please do resume. And we are, through testing, making sure that it won’t spread in some very, very big ways.