Bill Gates says he’s cancelling holiday plans as Omicron ushers in ‘worst part’ of pandemic

Billionaire says Omicron ’spreading faster than any virus in history’

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the latest American to consider cancelling holiday plans, now that the rapidly spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus has become the driving force behind most new Covid cases in the US.

“Just when it seemed like life would return to normal, we could be entering the worst part of the pandemic. Omicron will hit home for all of us,” Mr Gates wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Close friends of mine now have it, and I’ve cancelled most of my holiday plans.”

The Independent has reached out to Mr Gates for comment on what plans he’s cancelling, and what plans he’s carrying through.

The entrepreneur, whose Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is a significant global funder of public health and Covid response, said the virus is “spreading faster than any virus in history”, even though it was only discovered last month and is still being studied by scientists to understand its basic characteristics.

“If there’s good news here, it’s that Omicron moves so quickly that once it becomes dominant in a country, the wave there should last less than three months,” Mr Gates added. “Those few months could be bad, but I still believe if we take the right steps, the pandemic can be over in 2022.”

The coronavirus hasn’t stopped the Gates family from partying in the past.

In October, the recently divorced Melinda and Bill were spotted at their daughter’s wedding, a bash on a farm in Westchester County, New York, rumoured to cost at least $2 million.

Health officials announced yesterday that the new variant is now causing nearly three-quarters of new infections, based on data from the previous week.

The new coronavirus variant, first identified in South Africa, has now spread across at least 90 countries and caused 73 per cent of new cases in the US last week, per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Just last month, the highly contagious Delta variant was still causing virtually all US Covid cases.

So far, despite the meteoric rise in Omicron cases, major centers like New York City have avoided the sort of lockdown restrictions seen during the worst moments of Covid in 2020, instead preferring to rely on the city’s high vaccination rate and new vaccine proof rules as protection.