Dr. Michael Osterholm believes a set of national standards is needed to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
He pointed out that it means determining the measures that could make a difference. He said that, for example, he had not accessed data that shutting bars at 10 p.m. is more helpful than not closing them at all.
“The economy will shut down on its own if we see this uncontrolled transmission,” he told “The News with Shepard Smith." “If our healthcare facilities start to fail, if people begin dying in emergency room waiting rooms after 10 hours of waiting to get a room, you’re going to see people then, at that point, refusing to go into public at all, and that’s what’s really going to have the ultimate impact on the economy.”
“If we’re going to ask anyone in America, whether it’s an individual or company, to close down or to lose a job because we want them to distance so that we can stop this pandemic, we have to understand that we have to take care of them,” said Dr. Osterholm.
He also emphasized that wearing masks and washing hands are not enough.
"We want to do what really is going to make an impact, and I think the European experience is a very important one," he said.
Lockdown in the U.S.
Dr. Osterholm previously said that a U.S. lockdown of 4 to 6 weeks can help control the coronavirus pandemic and keep the economy afloat.
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.”
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.
