The United States will undergo an unprecedented lockdown to slow the inevitable spread of coronavirus—according to Joe Biden’s pick to advise for the coronavirus task force, who said a four to six week lockdown is the only way to get the pandemic under control, Your Content has learned.
A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, Dr. Michael Osterholm told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“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. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
On Wednesday, Osterholm said such a lockdown would help the country bring the virus under control, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.”
Epidemiologists have repeatedly pointed to New Zealand, Australia and parts of Asia that have brought the number of daily new cases to under 10 as an example of how to contain the virus.
“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,” he said Wednesday.