Bill Gates: Social distancing comes at 'huge economic price'

Billionaire Bill Gates is warning that although social distancing is necessary to combat the coronavirus, it will also come at a massive cost to the U.S. economy. Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman breaks down the latest comments from the Microsoft co-founder.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: But right now, we're digging into the way that some of the most forefront minds in the US are thinking about the coronavirus crisis. And one of those minds is, of course, Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He's already been a closely-watched expert through all of this through the work that he's been doing through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Keep in mind, Bill Gates also warned about the potential threat of an outbreak back in 2015, saying that it was something that people should have been paying more attention to.

And now five years later, the founder of Microsoft says that he is throwing billions of his own money into research to get a vaccine sooner rather than later-- spread across multiple facilities in the battle against COVID-19. And yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, Gates gave the update and, potentially, a reason to be a little bit more optimistic here, saying that his models are reflecting the positive impact of more and more people staying at home and more reasons to believe that we might actually come in underneath the projections out of the White House for 100,000 to 240,000 total deaths here in the US tied to COVID-19. Here's what he had to say.

BILL GATES: The various models that we and Pearl University do show that without this dramatic behavior change, you could even get worse than that. But I do think if we get the testing fixed, we get all 50 states involved, we'll be below that. Of course, we'll pay a huge economic price in order to achieve that.

ZACK GUZMAN: "Things won't go back to normal-- truly normal-- until we have a vaccine that we've gotten out to basically the entire world." End quote. That's the entire world. So, guys, I mean, when we think about that, it doesn't necessarily sound like it might be anytime soon. So kind of doubling down here on saying that we need to keep up the stay-at-home orders and make sure that we are practicing social distancing in order to come in below those dire projections that we heard from the White House. So optimism, but also saying that he needs to throw in the money to get those vaccines, because without them, we can't really realistically get back to normal.

HEIDI CHUNG: Yeah, Zack. I think Bill Gates obviously making a lot of salient points there. But it's difficult, because we live in the US, and a lot of these different mandates, whether it's the local or state level, is decided on those different levels-- so state and local levels, as opposed to a federal level. So while New York City is certainly the epicenter of the outbreak here in the US, we have seen that infection rates are trailing in other states as well.

So a lot of other states right now haven't put formal mandates in place when it comes to social distancing and quarantines. And so I think that is one of the challenges that we're facing is that, sure, New York may have peaked in the previous week, but we're going to see Los Angeles follow suit as well as a lot of other metropolitan areas as well.

That being said, Zack, to your point, I think that there is this sense that there's going to be a new normal in the books once we do come out of this. But RBC was out with an investor survey last week, and it-- a lot of folks in that survey saying, sure, it's encouraging that we're seeing a lot of different aspects of the market stabilize, but we're not going to really see anything significant until we do have a vaccine out in the market right now.

ZACK GUZMAN: And, Brian, I mean, maybe that's why he's so invested here to throw billions of dollars into research there, because when you think about the costs to keeping the economy shut down here, even moving it up a couple months would be pretty impactful.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah. What's important, too, is that it's not just about flattening the curve, it's about having the technology to make sure that the curve doesn't re-steepen after that point in time, which is going to require more work from all of us-- all those people that are watching this and making sure that you kind of change your social habits. Keep the social distancing even after the curve has been flattened-- things like not blowing out the candles on the birthday cake anymore, not hugging or shaking hands as often, as much. I think those are all going to be behavioral things that's going to really determine, in addition to the technological things Bill Gates was talking about, that are going to be required to make sure it doesn't flare up again when we do flatten the curve.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. And as an April birthday myself, I'll just come out and speak to that-- it's a small price to pay when you think about everything that we can do out there as well.