Of every four people infected by covid-19, one of them is American — a statistic that highlights the United States’ failure to contain the spread of the coronavirus compared to other nations that have suffered outbreaks. Driving the staggering case numbers in the United States is the struggle to provide timely testing, said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and co-founder of Microsoft. “No other country has the testing insanity, because they won’t talk about fixing it,” Gates said Sunday in an interview on CNN’s “GPS” with Fareed Zakaria. “A variety of early missteps by the U.S. and the political atmosphere meant that we didn’t get our testing going,” he said. Coupled with what he described as lockdown measures that were less strict than those of other nations, Gates said: “We are paying a pretty dramatic price, and not just in deaths.

Source: Washington Post August 10, 2020 04:22 UTC