“The clear message [would be] that we have no choice to maintain this isolation and that’s going to keep going for a period of time,” Bill Gates told TED curator Chris Anderson on Tuesday. “In the Chinese case, it was like six weeks, so we have to prepare ourselves for that and do it very well.”

According to Gates, “If you’re doing isolation well [nationally], within about 20 days you’ll see those numbers [of new cases] really change,” i.e., go down, ”…and that is a sign that you’re on your way.”…

Gates also emphasizes that it is important to prioritize the toll on human health over money.

“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes,” Gates said. “But money, you know bringing the economy back and doing money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. And so we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension — huge pain — in order to minimize the pain in the disease and death dimension.”