Dr. Michael Osterholm recommends U.S. lockdown of 4 to 6 weeks to help control the coronavirus pandemic and keep the economy afloat.
In an interview with Yahoo! Finance, Dr. Michael Osterholm, President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisor, explained that a nationwide lockdown could help bring down the number of new cases and hospitalizations to manageable levels while the world waits for a vaccine.
The number of infections is increasing as more people grow tired of mask-wearing and social distancing, experiencing so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
Dr. Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, on Wednesday mentioned an August op-ed he wrote with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two called for more organized lockdowns across the country.
“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in The New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Osterholm pointed out that such a lockdown would help the country manage the outbreaks, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.” Epidemiologists have consistently lauded New Zealand, Australia and Asian counties that have kept the number of daily new infections to under 10 as an example of how to curb the spread of the virus.
“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,” he said Wednesday.
Dr. Osterholm pointed out that the U.S. will be facing dark days before a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available. He noted health-care systems across the U.S. are already full in places such as El Paso, Texas, where local authorities have already shut down businesses and the federal government is delivering resources to control a surge in Covid-19 deaths.
Dr. Osterholm emphasized the importance of leadership in the country. He believes that Biden is up to the task of providing that leadership, saying that it could also come from local and state officers or those in the medical sector. He mentioned the fireside chats broadcast over radio during former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, through which Roosevelt talked to the people on issues, such as the Great Depression to World War II.
“People don’t want to hear that El Paso isn’t an isolated event. El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm,” he said. “I think that the message is: How do we get through this? We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, ‘This is what in the hell is going to happen.’”
