Five years ago Tuesday, Covid-19 was declared a "global pandemic" by the World Health Organization and life for many changed in unfathomable ways. States across the country reacted quickly, including in Minnesota where two days later Governor Tim Walz issued a Peacetime Emergency which ultimately impacted everyone's lives, and shut down much of the state's normal activity.
One of the most prominent voices heard on WCCO and other outlets over the ensuing days, weeks and months - and eventually years - when it came to what was happening both at home and across the globe, was Dr. Michael Osterholm.
Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota was and is one of the leading experts on infectious disease around the globe. For years leading up to COVID, he had warned of the risks of a global pandemic and that we were unprepared to deal with the fallout.
Speaking to WCCO's Chad Hartman Tuesday, Osterholm says the WHO was far too late in declaring it a pandemic and that caused issues across the world. CIDRAP actually declared two months prior to the WHO that it was already a pandemic.
"We needed to quickly get into that mode of what we're going to do about it, and how we're going to go about it almost two months earlier," says Osterholm. "During that same time period, I tried to promote this idea of, we had to prepare for this emergency now. With my colleagues, I went to several medical journals to see if we could publish a piece on why this was the emerging pandemic. All turned them down. I published a piece finally in the New York Times in late February saying the same thing, you know, get on with it. This is a pandemic."
It still took another month before that finally happened. Hindsight making it much easier to react of course, Osterholm says that was far from the only issue of slow reaction that hurt the response.
"I think that what we didn't do well was anticipate the idea that this was going to be a three year long process," Osterholm explains. "Again, I wrote a piece in the Washington Post in March, early March, saying 'don't, don't do lockdowns.' Lockdowns will never work and that was pretty counter to what many of my colleagues were saying. Part of it was nobody understood what the hell a lockdown was."
For Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz, he looks back on those events and his declaring a Peacetime Emergency without regret, saying they did they best they could with information they had.
"If I knew now some of the things, what we've learned from this, I would definitely do some things differently because I know the peripheral costs of that," says Walz. "But I also know that there are Minnesotans alive today because of the moves that we made, that had they lived in another state might not be true. And and I think that is a testament to the health experts, to the wisdom that stretches across Minnesota when it comes to good science, good health."
Most states, including Osterholm's home state of Minnesota, issued stay-at-home orders. The problem? Around 82% of workers in Minnesota were deemed "essential" and Osterholm says that wasn't going to stop the spread of anything.
"I saw it lasting three years, and I thought, 'you know, can you really do this for three years? No, we can't," he adds.
The other variable became those who accepted - and those that didn't - there needed to be measures in place to slow the spread of a virus that caused 1,123,836 deaths in the U.S. according to Johns Hopkins. Osterholm says it's impossible to say, but he still thinks there were better ways to go about it.
"I think the point though, is if I'm a citizen and I have faith in a system that's measuring something I can understand and I can directly relate my own behavior to that point, you know, whether it's the hospitals are overwhelmed, whatever, I think you have a much better chance of keeping people together with you," Osterholm predicts. "Let me just be clear, (lockdowns) were exaggerated, what they really did."
Osterholm also says his public persona as a bearer of bad news started early on when his prediction that hundreds of thousands were going to die was met with derision.
"When I was on Joe Rogan (Podcast) on March 10th, five years ago, I said that I likely believe there could be 800,000 deaths in the next three years," Osterholm remembers. "And man, I got panned royally for that. Ironically, 18 months later we hit our 800,000 deaths in this country."
Osterholm says it was the lack of belief in the science that caused the pandemic to continue as long as it did.
"This was a hurricane that was going to last for months and months before finally you could get into recovery," he told Hartman. "We did not prepare the public for that, and that added to the tension, that added to the distrust, that added to people believing that the government didn't know what they were talking about."
When it comes to that future, Governor Walz says there are still concerns about how public health is being handled today.
"What I worry about is looking at the federal government, you've got another opportunity to do something with measles, and they're doing the same ridiculous, dangerous things that they did during COVID," explains Walz. "So of course, there's things we would do differently, but the one thing I would not do differently is deny the science."