Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus adviser to President-elect Joe Biden, recently said that a nationwide lockdown could help bring the country’s recent surge of COVID-19 cases under control.
What’s going on?
Osterholm told Yahoo Finance that the nationwide lockdown could bring down the number of cases and hospitalizations.
- “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.”
- “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.
Flashback:
Osterholm and Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari wrote an op-ed for The New York Times earlier this week that called for a lockdown, saying the previous lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic didn’t work well.
- “The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78% of its workers essential,” they wrote. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
Extra details:
Osterholm was named to the 12-member COVID-19 advisory board for Biden, which also includes former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University, according to CNBC.