A newly appointed coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden suggested the U.S. enter a lockdown of four to six weeks to help get the surging pandemic under control as the nation awaits a vaccine.
Dr. Michael Osterholm told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday that the country has “a big pool of money” to pay workers for lost wages if businesses close down for a month or more.
“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; for city, state, county governments,” Osterholm said.
“If we did that, then we could lockdown for four to six weeks, and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down—like they’ve done in Asia, like they did in New Zealand and Australia,” he said.
“And then we could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year and bringing back the economy long before that,” he added.
Osterholm, who is the director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned earlier this week that U.S. cases will “continue to increase substantially” heading into the holidays.
“What America has to understand is that we are about to enter COVID hell,” Osterholm told CNBC on Monday.
“We have not even come close to the peak and, as such, our hospitals are now being overrun,” he said. “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic.”
The U.S. leads the world with more than 241,000 deaths and over 10 million coronavirus cases.
The nation hit another single-day record on Tuesday, when more than 136,000 cases were reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. At least 1,415 deaths were recorded nationwide Tuesday.
