November 12th. Michael Osterholm, an pandemic advisor to the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Biden, said that the closure of cities across the United States may help bring the COVID- 19 pandemic in the United States under control, and even promote The US economy recovers.
According to ABC News, Osterholm raised this idea in an interview with Yahoo Finance on Wednesday (11th). Osterholm said that the United States can manage coronavirus pandemic by closing businesses for 4 to 6 weeks and paying people for lost wages until people are vaccinated. Osterholm said this situation may reduce infection and hospitalization rates, as in New Zealand and Australia. “Then we can really see ourselves starting to use vaccines in the first and second quarters of next year, while at the same time recovering the economy much earlier.”
Earlier, Osterholm and Minneapolis Federal Reserve Chairman Neel Kashkari co-authored an article pointed out that the problem with the lockdown of the US from March to May this year is that it is not strict nationwide. “For example, 78% of people in Minnesota believe that work is essential.” They pointed out, “If it is to be effective, the lockdown must be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
According to reports, Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, was appointed on the 9th as a member of the Biden team’s Covid-19 consultant. He served as the Special Envoy for Health and Safety Science of the U.S. State Department from June 2018 to May 2019.
In addition, according to CNN, among the 50 states in the United States, 44 states have newly confirmed cases in one week, an increase of at least 10% compared to the previous week. At present, there are an average of more than 1,000 pandemic hospitalized patients in the United States every day. CNN said these figures are not optimistic, because the increase in hospitalization is usually accompanied by an increase in deaths. Some experts said that the current number of confirmed cases of pandemic has increased significantly, far beyond most people’s imagination. Even so, the worst days of the US pandemic have not yet come. In the next few weeks, it will not be surprising if there are more than 200,000 new confirmed cases in a single day.
According to real-time statistics released by Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of about 15:30 on the 12th, Beijing time, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of pandemic in the United States was 10,400,227, and the cumulative number of deaths was 241,798. According to US media reports, since November 3, the United States has had more than 100,000 new cases in a single day for 9 consecutive days; the number of newly confirmed cases in the United States on the 11th was 144,133, reaching a new high again. On the same day, the three states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois all added new highs in a single day.
