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Closing down businesses and paying people for lost wages during a 4-to-6 week lockdown could get the COVID-19 pandemic under control in time for a vaccine, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.

As of this writing, the United States has more than 10.4 million cases of COVID-19, and over 241 thousand people already died from the pandemic. The number of people getting infected and hospitalized continues to increase nationwide. Therefore, a lockdown is necessary to control the spread of the virus. Several countries in Europe including France implemented another lockdown because they are also experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Dr. Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that the time frame of the lockdown could get the United States into the start of what is expected to be the first COVID-19 vaccine availability.

Cold weather has driven people indoors where the coronavirus can spread faster, according to Dr. Osterholdm. He added that people are also getting tired of following health protocols like social distancing, which is a sign of “pandemic fatigue.”

"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 cities, states, county governments, we could do all that. If we did that, then we could lockdown for 4 to 6 weeks," Osterholm told Yahoo Finance Wednesday. "And if we did that, we could drive the numbers down like they've done in Asia [as] they did in New Zealand and Australia."

One of Biden's new coronavirus task force doctors floating the idea of a 4-6 week lockdown:

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers ... if we did that, then we could lockdown for 4 to 6 weeks."pic.twitter.com/zNmuQvPpIJ

— Zack Guzman (@zGuz) November 11, 2020

The government can pay businesses, people during the lockdown

Referencing an August op-ed he wrote with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari, he said “we could borrow the money from ourselves at a historically low-interest rate, we can pay people to lose their jobs, we can pay small businesses, we can take care of the city, state, and county governments, if we just elected to do that.”

Dr. Osterholm said this week that the country is entering is what he calls "COVID hell."

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

Osterholm was appointed to Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board” on Monday. The panel of advisors is co-chaired by former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner David Kessler, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University.

Other members of the task force include Dr. Rick Bright, the whistleblower who resigned his post with the Trump administration, and Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard. 

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