Covid 19 coronavirus: Biden adviser urges closure ‘like New Zealand and Australia’

A coronavirus adviser to Joe Biden has encouraged the president-elect to follow a New Zealand and Australia-style lockdown for four to six weeks while warning of an approaching “Covid hell.”

Dr. Michael Osterholm said that a national US lockdown may be the best way to limit deaths and new coronavirus infections until a vaccine arrives.

Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, was appointed Monday to serve on Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board.”

He said such a blockade would help the country control the virus, “as they did in New Zealand and Australia.”

Osterholm said the US economy will not suffer as a result, if enough money is borrowed to pay wages during closures.

“We could pay a package right now to cover all wages, lost wages of individual workers due to losses of small and medium businesses or city, state and county governments. We could do all of that,” Osterholm told Yahoo. Finance. “If we did that, then we could lock ourselves up for four to six weeks.”

Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations have risen in the US with single-day highs across the country, although deaths are still about half what they were at the April peak.

Osterholm warned earlier this week that the country is facing an imminent crisis, with cases on the rise and the likelihood that more people will tire of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue.”

He said the next three to four months will be the darkest period for the pandemic, as new daily cases continue to exceed 100,000.

“What the United States has to understand is that we are about to enter Covid hell,” he told CNBC. “It’s happening.

“We have not even come close to the peak and as such our hospitals are being overrun. The next three or four months are going to be by far the darkest of the pandemic.”

Osterholm said what the country needs now is leadership to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy going until a vaccine is approved and distributed.

He also referred to a New York Times op-ed written by him and Minneapolis Federal Reserve Chairman Neel Kashkari in August in which they had advocated for a broader national shutdown.

“The problem with the March-May shutdown was that it was not uniformly strict across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in the New York Times. “To be effective, the blockade has to be as complete and strict as possible.”

Osterholm said that if a national lockdown were applied there, it would act as a circuit breaker for virus infections.

“We could really see ourselves navigating vaccine availability in the first and second quarters of next year as we recover the economy much earlier,” he said.