Contagious illness expert Michael Osterholm on Monday opposed President Donald Trump‘s fanciful claim that the U.S. will soon be in “excellent shape” with the coronavirus pandemic, instead forecasting “an explosion” in new cases starting next month.
Osterholm, director of the Center for Contagious Illness Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN‘s Don Lemon that the U.S. is “simply really beginning to get to the really large part of the issue” with an average of 45,000 to 50,000 brand-new confirmed cases of the infection each day.
” When school starts both at the high school level and in college and universities, we believe we’re visiting a surge of cases in September that will far exceed what we saw after Memorial Day,” Osterholm stated. “Which this is just going to continue increasing, getting greater and greater, in regards to numbers.”
Osterholm elaborated in an op-ed he composed with Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, that was released in The New York Times on Friday The column argued the U.S. needs another lockdown to slow the spread of the infection.
” We believe the choice is clear,” Osterholm and Kashkari wrote. ” We can continue to allow the coronavirus to spread quickly throughout the country or we can commit to a more limiting lockdown, state by state, for up to 6 weeks to crush the spread of the infection to less than one new case per 100,000 individuals daily.”
” That’s the point at which we will be able to limit the increase in new cases through aggressive public health steps, just as other countries have done.
Check out Osterholm and Kashkari’s op-ed here. See Osterholm’s interview below:
Transmittable disease expert Michael Osterholm states the US needs another lockdown to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19
” We think we will see a surge of cases in September that will far exceed what we saw after Memorial Day,” he states. https://t.co/YZU6zqxUtj pic.twitter.com/caLT8CFaJ4
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) August 11, 2020
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