Osterholm Quotes

"We're seeing the B117, or the UK variant, double about every 10 days in this country....It often takes, 4, 6, even 8 weeks of this virus circulating before it really takes off, going from kind of the small little brush pile fire to a large forest fire."

"If we have large segments of the population that say, ‘Oh I’m not gonna get the vaccinated now,’ we very well could see ongoing transmission that would make it more challenging to get back to that new normal.”

"We've got this B117 surge coming....Everybody who's doing all the planning to bring everything back [eg, schools, restaurants, bars] unfortunately also has to have that other plan available that then does everything to go the other way [to more restrictions]."

"I think [the CDC's school guidelines] are enough, particularly if you are looking at children from K to 8 grade. There we really do see very little transmission....When we get into high school that's a little bit of a different issue. But there is a red flag coming down the road, I think, and that is the new [COVID] variants."

"When you double mask, you want something that is tight face fitting, and something you can use, something that is breathable....Merely putting that much more in front of your face doesn't improve filtration necessarily."

"I think the data will bear out that a single [COVID vaccine] dose actually does very well, particularly in preventing serious illness, hospitalization, and deaths....We don't want to ever, ever consider not giving the second dose—that's important—but we may want to postpone that."

"I can tell you, we are going to have another surge [with COVID-19 variants], and when it happens, the lower [baseline of infections] we start from, the better we're going to be."

"I’m fortunate because I’m in the health care area to have an N95, but you know what the most important thing is that I do? I go to the grocery store at five in the morning as does my partner and there’s no one there."

"What we're concerned about is that this new [B117] variant might mean there's much more virus in the same setting than there was before....Suddenly all those trips you made to the grocery store that weren't an exposure now becomes one. That's the challenge we're up against."

"We have to have the public understand that all of these events in life [including Hank Aaron's death] occur on a routine basis, and that, coincidentally, they're going to occur in the same time period that a vaccine would occur."

"You don't want just a group of different organizations descending upon a state and [saying], hi, we're going to open a [COVID] vaccine shop. And so one of the challenges right now that is being addressed is, how do the states and the federal government coordinate to do this kind of rollout?"

"I think we are going to see, in six to eight weeks, major [coronavirus] transmission in this country like we’re seeing in England....If we can set up vaccine clinics faster and more efficiently, how many lives do we save?"

"We will vaccinate a large portion of our population; that I’m confident in. But will it be enough to actually slow down transmission enough to the point where we feel safe and back in public places doing the things we love to do? I don’t think at this point we have enough information to know that."

"It should be a red alert to localities that this [coronavirus] variant is now here, and we have to be even more concerned about its potential to cause more infections and what that will do to our health care system. This will just add to the capacity challenges we've already had."

"The challenge we have right now is this last mile and last inch. The last mile meaning getting the [COVID-19] vaccine out to the people who need it. Right now state and local health departments have no resources to do this, the private sector partners also are challenged, and so we've got to fix this last mile."

"I have said over and over again, if we don't swap air with others, meaning we don't put ourselves in harm's way to be in contact with others, we do that physical distancing, we stay at home - if we do that, that's the thing that will really drive [COVID-19] case numbers down."

"I wish every person could spend 30 minutes in the corner of an ICU. They would have a very different sense of reality. When people start dying in emergency rooms because they can't get a bed, maybe that's when Americans will get a different sense of reality."

"I shudder to imagine what things might be like in two weeks....Once you go over the [COVID-19] case cliff, where you have so many cases that you overwhelm the system, basically at that point when you fall off that case cliff, you’re going to see mortality rates go up substantially."

“It really is a situation where health care workers are the ultimate shock absorber for so many medical, [social], and economic issues. We are definitely outstripping the capacity of hospitals in terms of personnel…so what happens is that we ask health care workers who are already very, very stressed to take on even more.”

"What America has to understand is that we are about to enter COVID hell. It is happening....We have not even come close to the peak, and as such, our hospitals are now being overrun."