A US national lockdown of schools and businesses is "a measure of last resort," according to President-elect Joe Biden's coronavirus advisors.
They have given expressing stances on whether the U.S. msut implement adopt lockdown measures to address the recent increase in Covid-19 cases.
“That’s a measure of last resort,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general that leads the group, said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” He said that any US national lockdown at this phase of the pandemic would appear different than the closures which states imposed in the spring to contain the virus.
“In the spring we didn’t know a lot about Covid, we responded, in a sense, with an on-off switch. We just shut things down because we didn’t know exactly how this was spreading and where it was spreading, but we learned a lot more since then,” Murthy said.
According to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Covid-19 cases were increasing by 5% or more in 47 states as of Saturday, based on a weekly average. The U.S. posted 166,555 new infections on Saturday, the second-highest daily number of new cases so far.
The U.S. currently records a weekly average of 145,401 cases every day, a more than 33% increase compared with a week ago and a record high average. The country reported over 11 million Covid-19 infections on Sunday, bringing another 1 million cases in less than a week.
Not in Biden's thinking
Murthy’s remarks come after another coronavirus advisor to Biden, Dr. Michael Osterholm, who works as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Yahoo Finance in an interview that closing down businesses for four to six weeks while compensating people for lost wages could help address rising cases and hospitalizations.
Osterholm later clarified his statements in an interview with NBC News, saying, “It was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it.”
The number of infections is increasing as more people grow tired of mask-wearing and social distancing, experiencing so-called “pandemic fatigue,” Osterholm 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 pointed out that 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.
However, a Biden transition official told NBC News that a US national shutdown “is not in line with the president-elect’s thinking.”
“We are not in support of a nationwide lockdown,” Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard and a Biden advisor, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “You can have targeted measures building on mask-wearing to include widespread testing, can include dialing up and down capacity restrictions, and those measures need to happen on a more localized basis.”
