no- , it was a total waste of time. um, it was fun, though, because i got to spend the day with andy bernard. he's really cool. - yeah, he is. - yeah, he is. - he's like the coolest person i've ever met. - that's...right. he's like marlon brando. captioning by captionmax www.captionmax.com - oh. do you mean marlon wayans? 'cause he is. - i actually do mean marlon wayans, yeah. everybody? trevor noah here. welcome to another episode of "the daily distancing show." it is now day 18 of staying at home to prevent the spread to have the coronavirus. here's your quarantine tip of the day, i know these have been helping you live your life, if you crank up the thermostat high enough and look directly into your light bulbs, it's basically like you're at the beach. you're welcome. on tonight's episode, dr. fauci

gets a security detail, talk to bill gates about fighting the coronavirus, and america has moved on from toilet paper and are now hoarding guns. let's get into it. "the daily distancing show." >> from trevor's couch in new york city to your couch somewhere in the world, this is "the daily distancing show" with trevor noah! >> trevor: let's kick it off with good news. like everyone now, scientists around the world are no longer thinking about anything other than the coronavirus. in fact, many scientists have dropped almost all other research and are only focusing on cures and treatments for covid 19, which i think is great, because i think scientists are too busy working on random shit, anyway. there's always the one random scientist where you read the headline, new study shows ducks can only live two seconds in states. we don't even need to know that! who's doing that experiment?

how did you get money into this? now scientists are deciding they will put cooperation ahead of competition and share research immediately rather than waiting for months published results and get credit for themselves, which makes sense to me, this is not the time to worry about credit. trying to get credit for stopping coronavirus is a waste of your time anyway. we all know president trump will take the credit no matter what happens, so relax. ready, trump, you did it? you damn straight. how did you do it? i put the thing in the thing and, boom, it disappeared. some of this research is coming from an unlikely source. yeah, one of the companies who announced a possible breakthrough in vaccine development is the cigarette giant british american tobacco. yeah, those guys. they claim that proteins extracted from tobacco plants could lead to a cure tore coronavirus. and you know what? i'm not surprised. they spent years destroying people's lungs, of course they know what it's all about.

coronavirus is basically their competition. this is one of those to catch a killer you've got to be the killer. the hannibal lector of coronavirus. so scientists are teaming up, tobacco companies are trying to do something good for a change, but in not-so-good news, there are now nearly 1 million coronavirus cases around the globe. the number keeps going up and here in the u.s. yesterday's death toll was over 1,000, the highest yet. those aren't the only bad numbers, a record 6.6 million americans filed for unemployment last week. yeah, 6.6 million people filed for unemployment. i know it can be hard to wrap your mind around numbers like that. but look at the graph showing the spike in job losses. see that? look at that spike. looks like unemployment overdosed on viagra and got a four-hour boner, we have to call a doctor. but you call a doctor after the four hours. before that, you've got to use

what you've got. that's not the only record being set now. over the past month, 3.7 million people have tried to buy guns. the highest number the f.b.i. has ever recorded. so during this pandemic, the two things people in america want the most are guns and toilet paper which makes sense because when i see someone carrying a gun i shit myself. i don't know why stocking up on firearms will help you in a pandemic. to protect yourself from outsiders, think outof the box. you need a recording of someone coughing on a loop. play that in your house all the night. someone comes in the window, no, i'm not messing with this house. there is one person out there who needs more protection right now, dr. anthony fauci, the man whose calm leadership during this crisis has won him the respect of all intelligent people and president trump and, according to reports, dr. fauci has now been assigned a security detail because of threats being

made against him, which is insane. why would you threaten dr. fauci?! and authorities aren't sure where the threats are coming from, but police have released a sketch of a potential suspect, and i dont know who it is because of the glasses, but that facing looks familiar. now, unfortunately, getting threats is fairly standard for anyone in the public eye, but what's not standard is that dr. fauci is also receiving lots of "unwelcomed communications from fervent admirers." yes. that's a nice way to say that your groupies are crazy. who would have thought one day we would live in a world where the whole planet would be grounded and the epidemologist would be the hottest man on earth. i gotta get me some of that fauci, you know he got that vaccine, girl. who's sexier than fauci? nobody. if "people" magazine doesn't hit him on the cover, they're wasting their lives.

more and more governors are announcing belated stay-at-home orders for their states. yesterday after weeks of resisting, the governor of florida, ron ron desantis, finay announce add lockdown for his state on april fool's day. florida is officially locked down, which means mickey mouse and all his friends will have to work from home, which i think is perfect for donald duck. due to his never worn pants, he was born for the teleconferencing life. do you wear pants? i don't. i would stand up right now, but you're not ready. i'm also not ready. i didn't think about that before i started telling that joke. but i'm not wearing pants, and i'm not ready. georgia is another place that institute a stay-at-home ban. brine brine declared a stay-at-home order and explained the reason he didn't do it sooner is he just found out that asymptomatic people can spread the virus. that's what he said, he said he

found out people who don't show symptoms can spread the coronavirus. he just found that out. yeah. that's something known widely for months. yeah. how can a governor be so far behind the curve? a governor. i just picture him watching season three of "westworld," guys, i'm starting to think some of these people might be robots. i don't know. something about them. but let's move on. because earlier today, i talked to someone who, unlike the governor of georgia, actually does know a lot about the coronavirus, mr. bill gates. so check it out. bill gates, welcome to "the daily distancing show." >> it's great to be on. >> trevor: let's jump straight into the first question that everybody would want me to ask. you delivered a ted talk where you predicted pretty much what is happening now. now, thanks to the world we live in, that has spouted a bunch of

conspiracy theories everything from bill gates invented this virus to prove himself right or he knew it was going to happen and that's why he said it, was that ted talk about this virus or was that a hypothetical that has now come true? >> well, i didn't know specifically it would be coronavirus and that it wouldt 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. so, sadly, this is not a case where, you know, i feel like, hey, i told you so, because we didn't use that time when it was clear the biggest threat to kill millions of people to have the diagnostics standing by, to be ready to ramp up a vaccine factory. a few things were tone. some countries, some will help

are the vaccines now, will help with 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. >> trevor: here's a question i have as an individual. how is it that you as a nongovernment knew this information and knew that it need to be acted on, and governments and organizations that are specifically tasked with protecting people from this very thing either didn't have the information or ignored it, what do you think happened there? because i know you interact with governments, you talk to organizations like the c.d.c., like the w.h.o. what went wrong? >> well, there are lots of individuals who were as worried

as i was. you know, people like dr. fauci, who had been through various epidemics. so, when we had ebola, zika, sars, mers, we were lucky that they didn't transmit very easily, they weren't these respiratory viruses where somebody who's not very symptomatic and is still walking around can spread the disease, in some cases to literally dozens of people. so the respiratory transmission, particularly because world travel is so intense, that's where i show the simulation in that speech and say this keeps me up at night more than even war, which is no small thing, and, yet, in terms of being systematic about, okay, let's run a simulation and see how would we reach out to the private sector for tests or ventilators and what kind of

quarantine would we do. and as we enter into this, we haven't practiced at all. so you can see it's every state is being forced to figure things out on their own, and it's very ad hoc. it's not like when a war comes and we've done, you know, 20 simulations of various types of threats, and we've made sure that the training, communications, logistics, all those pieces fall into place very rapidly. >> trevor: you are in an interesting position where, in many ways, you are an expert on this topic because of the work you now do in philanthropy. your goal has been to eradicate malaria across the globe, focusing in africa. you work with infectious disease, you work with experts in and around infectious disease. when you look at the coronavirus as it stands now, it's happened, leaders acted late, but what do you think needs to be done going

forward? you wrote an interesting op-ed about this, but what do you think we need to do from the ground up, from the people to the leaders to the private sector? >> well, the main tools we have right now are the behavioral change, the social distancing, which often means staying at home most of the time, and the testing capacity to identify who in particular needs to get isolated and then testing their contacts to make sure that we can catch it so early that a lot of people who get sick don't infect anyone else. now, so our foundation is engaged in projecting what's going to go on, the modeling, our partner i.t.m.e.s telling each state what they should think about in terms of ventilators and capacity. further on out, the work that we're doing to find a therapeutic, a drug to reduce

the disease, to cut the deaths down, you know, we're hopeful that, even in six months, some of those will have been approved. but the ultimate solution, the only thing that really lets us go back completely to normal and feel good about sitting in a stadium with lots of other people is to create a vaccine and not just take care of our country but take that vaccine out to the global population so that we have vast immunity and this thing, no matter what, isn't going to spread in large numbers. >> trevor: you have a unique advantage point in that you have been communicating with various governments around the world in and around the covid 19 response, what they plan to do and what they haven't done thus far. which countries do you think we should be looking to for models that work and can we apply those models to a larger country like the united states?

so many people say italy and korea, yes, have their numbers, but they can't necessarily be applied to america. is that true or not or is there a model that seems to work and should be followed for everybody? >> well, countries have differences. you know, south korea did get a medium-sized infection, but then they used testing, enforced quarantine, contact tracing and really bent the curve, even though it looked pretty scary there for a while. the epidemic in the united states is more widespread than it ever got in south korea. so we're like the part of china, hubei province, where a lot of the cases were in one city, wuhan. and the u.s. and china are different. you know, the lockdowns that we do won't be as strictly enforced, but they are very, very important. the way we do contact tracing won't be as invasive and, so, it won't be quite as perfect, but it is very good news that china,

although they are maintaining a lot of measures, they are not seeing a rebound, they're not seeing cases coming back, etch though they are sending people back to the factories, sending people back to schools. and, you know, so, thank goodness, if we're see ago big rebound there, the idea you could keep it under control once you have a large number of cases like the u.s. does in many countries in europe, then, you know, it would seem almost impossible. so it can be done. you know, china ended up with .01% of their population infected. you know, our goal is to stay so it's only a few percent, so at least the medical penalty isn't gigantic, even though the economic penalty will be very large. >> trevor: when you look at that balance between the economic penalty and the human penalty, there are some who have argued that the economic penalty

will, over time, equal the human penalty. now, you were one of the few people in the world where you actually have enough money to tell us about whether or not an economy shifting in this way or another way is going to cause mass deaths, but how do you think we should be looking at this? because, yes, there is an economy and, yes, there is human life, but where do you think the truth lies? >> well, there isn't a choice where you get to say to people don't pay attention to this epidemic. you know, most people, they have older relatives, you know, they're worried about getting sick. the idea of a normal economy is not there as a choice. you know, 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. >> trevor: mm-hmm. >> so to get back economically, taking the pain extremely now and telling, you know, 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, you know, that is the right thing, even though it's extremely painful, it's unheard of. you know, 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 overoptimistic statements actually work against that. >> trevor: what do you think most people are missing right now? because everyone has an opinion. you know, everyone from my mom to my friends to people online, everyone has an opinion on coronavirus because we have very few centralized sources that people trust. but what do you think people are missing about this virus and this moment and what we need to be doing as people? because we know the basics -- wash your hands, stay at home, stay away from other people, try to, you know, maintain a world where people are moving as little as possible, but what do you think we're missing that people might make a mistake and

exacerbate what we are going through now? >> well, the thing that needs to get fixed in the next few weeks is to prioritize our testing capacity, which is going up, but making sure the right people are being tested. that will guide us in a very deep way. >> and who are the right people? >> if you're symptomatic or somebody you have been in close contact with tested positive, you know, those are the broad categories. of course, in the front of the line, you have health workers or essential workers who have to go, you know, keep the food supply, the medical system, water, electricity, internet, keep those things running for the people who are mostly at home, but that doesn't use up that higher percentage of the testing capacity. we have a lot of people without symptoms who are just kind of worried, and there we need to

show them that until our capacity goes up a lot, they are going to have to wait. the worst thing we have is if it takes you longer than 24 hours to get the test result, then you don't know -- you haven't been told during the very key period where you're most infectious to take extreme measures, and, so, we've got to get not just the numbers out, that confuses people, it's the speed of the results. south korea was giving those results in less than 24 hours. >> trevor: so if we have tests that are ramping up around the world, we're going to see the numbers going up. now, some have said that number and the mortality or fatality rate can be deceptive because there are so many who aren't getting tested and are we covering and, so, we don't really know how dangerous or how fatal this disease actually is. what is needed in the realm of testing? what i'm trying to say is i

understand you want to get as many tests as possible, but once we've tested as many people as we've tested, what are we trying to get to as an end goal? >> well, for rich countries that do the right policies, you should be able to plateau and get the cases down with less than a few percent of the population infected. china, south korea, you know, they are countries that absolutely have achieved that, and that means that your total deaths is actually not gigantic. now, in developing countries, the about to do lots of testing, to have the patients who have severe respiratory distress get treatment and do this social isolation. for developing countries, it's far harder, and, so, you know, there, will these measures actually stop it from getting to

a large part of the population, places like india, nigeria? you know, i was talking to president ronald posa today who is not only president of south africa, he's the head of the african union, and he's a very strong voice in encouraging the countries there to act quickly when the number of cases is still fairly low, which is true throughout sub saharan africa right now. >> trevor: when you look at where we are right now, the one thing we can't deny is everybody has dealt with the coronavirus on a different time line. not just across the globe. i mean even with the united states, you have states like georgia and florida that implemented stay-at-home orders, you have many other states that haven't done it at all. is this going to fundamentally undermine the efforts of the states and other countries that have shut themselves down?

because if the numbers dip in one country and another country hasn't had the same amount of shutdowns or people self-quarantining -- for instance, if people from brazil travel after this, or belarus or another country where a leader hasn't taken it seriously, will that undermine terrorist completely? is there a point to doing this where everybody isn't doing this? >> sadly, at some level of wealth, there will be countries that, no matter how hard they try, they will have a widespread epidemic. and, so, again, sadly, the richer countries that contain the epidemic will not allow people from those countries to come in, you know, unless they are quarantined or tested or proved they're immune. so this is going to stop people going across borders very dramatically these next few years until we get to that full vaccination.

within the united states is different because we're not going to partition the country, and, so, therefore, we are all in it together. we can't do what we're going to do with foreign nationals, which is reduce the numbers a lot and have very strict screening there. we're not going to have at every state border some complex quarantine center, and, so, the whole country needs -- even when you have small numbers because those can exponentiate to big numbers so quickly -- you know the double time is three days when you're still behaving in the pre-epidemic way. so each country, you know, has to get the entire populous, even some who initially resisted, maybe for very good reasons because the economic effect on them is strong. so this is powerful medicine, but if you take a big dose of it

earlier, you don't have to take it for nearly as long. >> trevor: you are one of the first people to come out and donate a large chunk of money to fighting coronavirus or helping medical workers get the equipment they need. i remember the last i read, it was yourself and your wife melinda who pledged over $100 million. it seems, though, that money isn't able to fix this problem. it seems like governments around the world are trying everything they can but it doesn't seem like it can be fixed. what are you hoping to achieve at this moment in time? >> if we get the right testing capacity, you can change by literally millions the number who are infected, and government will eventually come up with lots of money for these things, but they don't know where to direct it, they can't move as quickly. so because, you know, our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we thought about the

epidemic, we did fund some things to be more prepared like a vaccine effort. our early money can accelerate things. so, 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 fund factories for all seven just so that we don't waste time in serially saying, okay, 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 efficacy and build manufacturing and they're different for different constructs, so it will be a few billion dollars we'll waste on manufacturing because to have the constructs that don't get

picked because something else is better. but if you're building in a situation where we're in where there are trillions of dollars being lost economically, it is worth it. in normal government procurement processes and understanding which are the right seven, if a few months those may kick in, but our foundation, you know, we can get that boot strapped and get it going and, you know, save months because every month counts. you know, things can reopen, if we do the right things in the summer, but it won't be completely normal. you will still be very worried. you know, we may decide masks are important, although right now they're in short supply for health workers, so people should not go and hoard those. but the capacity of that can be brought up, so it may be something that china today, everybody is walking around is wearing one of those.

so we'll have a lot of unusual measures, until we get the world vaccinated. you know, 7 billion people, that's a tall order, but it is where we need to get to despite a lot of things in between now and then to minimize the damage. >> trevor: you predicted this pandemic almost to a t, and maybe it was because we were dealing with other things at the time, we didn't really pay that much attention. is there anything else you want to warn us about now that we should be looking forward to? is there anything else that keeps you up at night? >> well, this is a naturally-caused epidemic, and as bad as it is, it looks -- if you have reasonable treatment -- to have a 1% fatality. there could be epidemics that are worse than that, including ones that aren't naturally caused that are a form of bio-terrorism. but i do -- one thing i feel good about is this is such a big

change to the world that, this time, it won't be like ebola which was just in west africa or central africa, this time, the tens of billions to have the diagnostics stand big, the vaccine manufacturing standing by, this time we will get ready for the next epidemic. >> trevor: well, i hope your words are prophetic, once again. thank you so much for your time. good luck in all of your work and stay healthy out there. we need you. >> hey, thanks, trevor. >> trevor: hopefully we will be paying tennis again soon. >> you bet. looking forward to it. >> trevor: thank you so much, bill gates. by the way, i texted you my venmo account. when we come back, we have an exclusive look at the first movie being made about the coronavirus. spoiler alert, might involve you. don't go away. (vo) at sprint, our priority is keeping our customers, employees, and communities safe.

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