Urging people to maintain calm and follow the safety guidelines, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has said countries that do a good job in testing of the deadly coronavirus and shut down could bounce back both economically as well as on the health front in weeks.

“If a country does a good job with testing and shut down, then within 6-10 weeks it should see very few cases and be able to open back up,” Gates said on Wednesday in response to a question during his rare appearance at Reddit, a social media site which is popular among the younger generation.

He said a combination of testing and social isolation clearly works.

“The current phase has a lot of the cases in rich countries. With the right actions including the testing and social distancing (which I call “shut down”), within 2-3 months the rich countries should have avoided high levels of infection,” Gates wrote in response to another question.

“I worry about all the economic damage but even worse will be how this will affect the developing countries who cannot do the social distancing the same way as rich countries and whose hospital capacity is much lower,” he said.