Osterholm Quotes

"We have to take the information that we get from this [coronavirus] pandemic—all aspects of it—and ask ourselves, much like the National Transportation Safety Board takes the black box from a crashed airplane: What can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again?"

"Do we think reopening is going to increase [COVID-19] cases? Sure should. But we have examples of states where it hasn't happened...We don't really know what is actually making the virus move like it is right now in some states and not others."

"At most, perhaps 5% of people have been infected (with SARS-CoV-2)....If all that pain, suffering and economic destruction got us to 5%, what will it take to get us to 60%? That's a sobering thought. All of that suffering and death is just getting started. People haven't quite got that yet.”

"My whole challenge has not been about whether you wear a mask or not...I’ll throw the kitchen sink at this if it will help. The challenge is, ‘How well do they work?’ so that the public knows what level of protection they’re getting.”

"We've almost seen a mind-set that if a little contact tracing is good, a lot more must be better....We’re saying, 'No that's not true.'"

"Given previous influenza pandemics, and this not an influenza virus so we don't know for certain it will act like that, but if it did, by far the second wave was the worst one of each of the pandemics....A second wave (of COVID-19) in late summer or early fall that lasts three or four months could make everything we've experience so far seem mild."

"We want smart [SARS-CoV-2] testing. You want the right population and the right person in that population to be tested at the right time, with the right test, with the right result and the right outcome for what you're going to use that test result for. It's about being strategic."

"We’re so focused on numbers of people being tested [for COVID-19], and we are not focusing on what the accomplishment of that testing is all about."

"If you’re gonna ring a bell, you’d better have a way to unring it....I don’t see anybody right now elaborating on, well, what happens if [COVID-19] cases go up four-fold in a two-week period? Will we reestablish these measures that we’ve had in place?"

"You can't be in lockdown for 18 months. We'll destroy society as we know it, and we don't know what we'll accomplish with it....We can't just let the virus go. Lots of people will die and it'll shut down our health system, not just for COVID patients, but for anyone with a health problem. What we need is a plan."

"We all have to confront the fact there’s not a magic bullet, short of a vaccine, that’s going to make this [COVID-19] go away....We’re going to be living with it. And we’re not having that discussion at all."

"Well, we have to understand that we're riding this tiger; we are not directing it. This virus [SARS-CoV-2] is going to do what it's going to do. What we can do is only nibble at the edges. And I think it’s not a good message to send to the public that we can control this virus in a meaningful way."

"It wouldn't surprise me if it [SARS-CoV-2] was here in December. There was so much connection between Wuhan and here, I'd be surprised if it wasn't....The horse was long out of the barn before anybody thought to close the barn door."

"I don't think we're communicating very well at all with the public, because I keep having to tell these people, you know, even if we had a [COVID-19] vaccine that showed some evidence of protection by September, we are so far from having a vaccine in people's arms."

"This thing's not going to stop until it infects 60 to 70 percent of people....The idea that this is going to be done soon defies microbiology."

"There is a large body of data right now showing how easily this is transmitted just in the air by breathing. You can literally just walk into a room, where someone with the virus is breathing, and their virus will be floating in the air....It doesn't mean wherever I walk I'm going to get infected. But if you're close to someone who is infected, you have a good chance of getting infected yourself."

"When I hear New York talking about the fact they are down the backside of the mountain, I know they have been through hell. And that is an important statement. But they have to understand that’s not the mountain. That is the foothills. They have mountains to go yet. We have a lot of people to get infected [with the coronavirus] before this is over."

"But I think equally challenging going forward is that we are in for really rough days coming yet [with COVID-19], and that's where credibility and leadership are going to be everything. You have to trust the individual who is telling you how bad things are, how bad they will get....We are going to need FDR-like fireside chats over the course of the next year or two."

"As a country, we’re unprepared not just logistically but mentally for this next [COVID-19] phase....The way you prepare people for a sprint and marathon are very different. As a country, we are utterly unprepared for the marathon ahead.

"There's got to be an approach in the middle. I call it 'threading the rope through the needle,' where we open our economy and everyday life in a way that is capable of rapidly detecting the emergence of new waves of [SARS-CoV-2] infection. Then we do whatever we can again with physical distancing to limit the new infection's spread."