Bill Gates says US efforts to test for coronavirus are 'not organized'
- Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates hosted a Reddit Q&A about the ongoing coronavirus crisis on Wednesday.
- Answering a question about the frequency of testing in Seattle, Gates said testing in the US as a whole was "not organized yet."
- He said he hopes the government sets up a website to direct people to where they can get home testing and kiosks.
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Bill Gates said during a Reddit Q&A on Wednesday that testing for the coronavirus in the US is "not organized yet."
Gates was responding to a question from a Seattle inhabitant who said they felt testing had not increased.
"The testing in the US is not organized yet. In the next few weeks I hope the Government fixes this by having a website you can go to to find out about home testing and kiosks," Gates, who lives near Seattle, responded.
Per capita the US lagged behind other countries on how many people it's testing for coronavirus, which can be ascribed partially to the fact that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to develop its own coronavirus test which turned out to be faulty.
"Things are a bit confused on this right now. In Seattle the U of W [University of Washington] is providing thousands of tests per day but no one is connected to a national tracking system," Gates added. His own philanthropic organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has funded the distribution of at-home coronavirus tests in Washington State.
Gates also supported the idea of monitoring the movements of confirmed coronavirus patients more closely. "Whenever there is a positive test it should be seen to understand where the disease is and whether we need to strengthen the social distancing. South Korea did a great job on this including digital contact tracing," he said.
South Korea created a system which tracked the movements of confirmed carriers, making the data publicly available on a government website and sending messages to people who may have crossed paths with them.
The Washington Post reported this week that big US tech firms including Facebook and Google have been in talks with the US to establish a similar disease-mapping system using anonymised location data.
The implementation of such systems raises issues about whether they could infringe on civil liberties. One South Korean woman told the post that since the tracker had gone live, she had stopped attending a bar known for being popular with gay women for fear that it could result in her being outed.
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