Bill Gates continues to speak out on the COVID-19 crisis. The Microsoft co-founder on Thursday appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, temporarily renamed The Daily Social Distancing Show.

Gates repeated many of the key points he’s been getting across over the past few weeks, such as the need for a complete nationwide shutdown and for better testing in the U.S. The global health expert on multiple occasions over the past decade talked about the potential for something like the novel coronavirus that has infected more than 1 million worldwide and killed more than 53,000 people.

If the country can stick to social distancing over the next few months and prioritize testing, Gates said the economy could begin to reopen “ideally in the early summer if things go well.”

“But it won’t be completely normal,” Gates cautioned. “You’ll still be very worried. We may decide masks are important … it may be something like China, where everybody is walking around wearing one of those. We’ll have a lot of unusual measures until we get the world vaccinated.”

STAT reported Thursday that the White House is expected to urge Americans to wear cloth masks to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, which has killed more than 6,100 people in the U.S. and infected more than 240,000.

Gates also said that global travel will look much different until a vaccine arrives, which could take 18 months or more.

“This is going to stop people going across borders very dramatically these next few years until we get to that full vaccination,” he said.

Here are other highlights from the interview, which you can watch in full above.

On balancing economic penalty and human penalty (8:40 in video): “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 is a choice. About 80% of people are going to change their activities. If you get the other 20% to go along with that nationwide, then the disease numbers will flatten — hopefully in the next month — and start to go down, hopefully in the month after that.

Then when they’ve gone down a lot, then in a tasteful way, using prioritized testing, you can start to reopen a lot of things like schools and work. Probably not sports events, because the chance of mass spread there 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. There are particular businesses that it’s catastrophic for.

That’s the only way you get 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 way.’

So people will need the confidence that the system is working and smart people are making decisions. And over-optimistic statements actually work against that.”

On his TED Talk from 2015 that predicted something like COVID-19 (0:35): “I didn’t know specifically that it’d be coronavirus and that it would hit in late 2019. But the goal of the talk was to encourage governments to make the investments so we could respond very quickly and keep the case numbers very, very low.

And so sadly, this is not a case where I feel like ‘hey, I told you so,’ because we didn’t use that time when it was clear as the biggest threat to kill millions of people, to have the diagnostic standing by, to be ready to ramp up a vaccine factory.

A few things were done. Our foundation funded some work that will help with the vaccines now and the diagnostics. But most of what was called for, particularly in a New England Journal of Medicine article I did that went into way more specifics than I could in a short TED Talk — those things didn’t get done. And so that’s why it’s taking us a long time to get our act together faced with this threat.”

On his foundation’s $100 million donation and what’s he’s trying to achieve (17:55): “If we get the right testing capacity, you can change by, literally millions, the number who are infected. Governments will eventually come up with lots of money for these things, but they don’t know where to direct it and they can’t move as quickly. And so because our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we’ve thought about the epidemic. We did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort.

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Our early money can accelerate things. For example, of all the vaccine constructs, the seven-most promising of those — even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to find factories for all seven. It’s so that we don’t waste time in serially saying ‘OK, which vaccine works,’ and then building the factory. Because to get to the best case, that people like myself and Dr. Fauci are saying is about 18 months, we need to do safety and efficacy and build manufacturing. And they’re different for the different constructs.

It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars being lost economically, it is worth it.

In normal government procurement processes and understanding which are the right seven, in a few months, those may kick in. But our foundation, we can get that bootstrapped and get it going and save months, because every month counts.”

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