On Tuesday, Dr. Michael Osterholm, a member of former Vice President Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, emphasized the need for a nationwide lockdown to mitigate the spread of the disease.
Osterholm told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the United States should follow the Asian countries like China and Japan in locking down the country.
“Well, first of all, if you interview 50 people, you can get 75 different definitions of what a lockdown is, OK, so let’s just be clear,” Osterholm stated. “I don’t think anybody knows what they’re talking about when they talk about a lockdown, myself included. In the first week of August, Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, and I wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times that basically said we need to, in a sense, lock down to drive this infection level to a place where we can actually control it with testing and tracing and follow-up that way, just like the Asian countries have done. And I’m talking about everything from Australia to New Zealand, all the way right up through China, Japan. All of those countries have done it already.”
“Really, to deal with the pain and suffering economically is what we basically proposed was because the savings rate in this country has gone out of the roof, since the pandemic,” he continued. “We have gone from 8% to over 22%. We can borrow the money from ourselves at historically low interest rates. We can pay people to lose their job. We can pay small business. We can take care of city, state and county governments if we’re elected to do that. If Washington could get together and make that happen. That would be a very different kind of lockdown where people wouldn’t suffer, and we can get this virus under control.”
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