One of President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisers suggested this week that the pandemic could be stemmed significantly, resulting in reduced hospitalizations and lower daily COVID-19 case counts and deaths, if the country dedicated itself to a four-to-six weeks long nationwide stay-at-home order.
Michael Osterholm, the current director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, was just named to a list of coronavirus advisers to Biden on Monday. Speaking to Yahoo! Finance on Wednesday, Osterholm suggested that a nationwide “lockdown” could ease the economic burdens created by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.
Osterholm explained that the nation is heading toward a “COVID hell” this winter. He acknowledged that a “pandemic fatigue” was partly to blame, as Americans grow weary of wearing masks and adhering to social distancing guidelines.
Despite that, however, a nationwide stay-at-home order for a month or so could stabilize or even reduce the number of new cases being witnessed daily. Such a plan, if supported by the federal government, could restart the nation’s economy too, he added.
“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,” Osterholm said. “We could do all of that. If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
Doing so at a time when a potential vaccine may be made available could be doubly beneficial, he added.
“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,” Osterholm said.
While several states issued similar stay-at-home orders in the spring of this year to quell the spread of the virus, Osterholm, writing in an op-ed in August alongside Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari, had noted that those orders were not successful because they lacked standardization.
“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country,” the pair wrote in their op-ed, which was published in The New York Times this summer. “For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
The stay-at-home order Osterholm has proposed would be similar in scope, he explained, to what New Zealand put in place earlier this year. That nation’s response to coronavirus is widely regarded as the gold-standard for how to contain and eradicate COVID-19.
The plan proposed by Osterholm, if implemented by Biden’s administration, would be a stark departure from what President Donald Trump has done — or rather, not done — since the beginning of the pandemic.
Trump campaigned hard against the idea of issuing stay-at-home orders, or of listening to health experts in general, in order to slow the spread of coronavirus. Instead, his administration has opted for adopting an approach that endorses the idea that “herd immunity” could eventually reduce the spread of the virus — a plan that many have criticized as being cruel, and tied to the idea of eugenics.
Trump reluctantly accepted a plan from his health experts in March that encouraged social distancing. But after a mere eight days of promoting that idea, he grew visibly impatient with it, and started demanding that states, which had issued their own stay-at-home orders in adherence to the principles of his plan, reopen their economies.
The president, it was said by sources with knowledge of his thinking, was worried that the shutdowns would be harmful to the economy, which in turn would be detrimental to his reelection prospects.
Since the pandemic began in early March, close to 242,000 Americans have died from coronavirus. Daily COVID-19 cases being reported are regularly reaching new record highs, with more than 142,000 new cases being announced on Wednesday.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy