Bill Gates says there's 'way above' a 5% risk we haven't seen the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic

• Bill Gates has said there's "way above" a 5% risk we haven't seen the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The Microsoft cofounder told the FT there could yet be a more transmissive and fatal coronavirus variant.

Bill Gates thinks there's more than a 5% risk we haven't seen the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We're still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal," the Microsoft cofounder said in an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday.

He added: "It's not likely, I don't want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it's way above a 5% risk that this pandemic, we haven't even seen the worst of it."

More than 6.2 million people globally are thought to have died from COVID-19. Gates, a longstanding advocate of pandemic preparedness, warned in a 2015 TED Talk that the world was "not ready" for a pandemic.

Gates told the FT that longer-lasting COVID-19 vaccines that blocked infection were needed.

In his upcoming book, "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic," Gates says he's optimistic that COVID-19 can be "the last pandemic."

The Microsoft cofounder suggested to the FT that a task force be put together to monitor global health emergencies, because the World Health Organization (WHO) currently has "less than 10 full-time people" on the lookout for deadly new viruses. The epidemic response team could be made up of experts including computer modelers as well as epidemiologists, he said.

In April 2020, Gates criticized Donald Trump for halting the annual $400 million in US funding for the WHO.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week that immunity levels from prior COVID-19 infection and vaccination were probably behind relatively low levels of hospitalization in the US. "We haven't seen them pick up as much as we might have expected in prior times during this pandemic, thanks to I believe a large amount of protection in the community," she said.