Gates optimism on COVID mortality opposes data

Bill Gates said Thursday that COVID-19 deaths could fall below seasonal flu levels by mid-2022. If he’s right, it will be a notable turnaround.

The United States still records a seven-day average of about 1,028 deaths from COVID-19; an annualized rate of 375,220, or about 10 times the rate of deaths from influenza in a relatively bad year.

In the short term, contagion patterns suggest that mortality from COVID it might get a little worse, not better.

This year, the US vaccination campaign briefly helped bring total all-cause mortality back to levels. “normal”Between April and mid-July. But the delta variant has reversed, at least temporarily, the improvement; In the summer of 2021, an excess mortality was registered even higher than in the same period of the previous year.

Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft Corp., projected that growing natural and vaccine-induced immunity around the world and new oral treatments will dramatically change both the rate of infection and death from COVID-19 by mid-2022. Gates made the remarks at the Bloomberg New Economy forum in Singapore.

The COVID-19 caused about 375,000 deaths in the United States in 2020, according to the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is equivalent to a rate of about 92 per 100,000. It was the third underlying cause of death, after heart disease and cancer, and largely responsible for the increase in total deaths in 2020.

In 2019, influenza was the ninth leading cause of death, with 39,783 fatalities, or 1.7% of the total, for a death rate of 15.2 per 100,000.