The coronavirus pandemic is a “nightmare”, but the deaths from the disease may not be as great as some people, including President Donald Trump, predict, according to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Last week, Donald Trump predicted that fatal COVID-19 cases in the United States would be between 100,000 and 240,000 before the epidemic was resolved. In doing so, he reiterated White House health adviser Anthony Fauci’s predictions.

“If we do social distance properly, we will be able to get out of this with significantly fewer deaths”, said Bill Gates. In his words, it is “very important” for them to come to light so that people can understand the situation.

On Sunday, there were at least 312,245 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States and more than 8,500 casualties. Globally, over 1.2 million people have been infected and 70,000 have died.

Bill Gates, who resigned from Microsoft this month to focus on philanthropic activity, said that if people continue social distance and remain quarantined, the cases will start to drop by the end of this month.

“It’s a nightmare scenario because the human-to-human transmission of respiratory viruses can grow exponentially”, he said. “You know, if we continued to go to work, travel as before, this curve would never go down until most people became infected, and then a huge number did not seek medical care and there were many, many deaths”, added he.

Bill Gates predicts that things will “not completely return to their normal form until we have a vaccine that can reach literally the entire world”.

Although the pandemic is “super, super bad”, Gates claims it is not the “worst-case”. He cites low mortality from COVID-19 compared to diseases such as variola.

Bill Gates previously said the United States missed its chance to avoid the mandatory blockade because they did not act quickly enough in response to the pandemic.

In 2015, the entrepreneur warned that in the coming decade, we would face an illness that would be more threatened by war and would result in millions of casualties. According to him, since then, only 5% has been done to address a situation such as that of the coronavirus at the moment.

“It’s hard to invest money in something that doesn’t know if it’s going to happen”, he said. “I am sure that after all that has such a huge impact, we will invest this money”.

In February, Bill Gates said that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would donate 100 million USD to COVID-19’s global response.