Osterholm Quotes

"Someone has to collect the garbage, deliver the foods and medicines, and keep basic services running, no matter what. We are going to have to learn to live with this [COVID-19] virus to some degree, until there is a vaccine — no matter what the data shows. Otherwise, there is no economy."

This virus will find everyone. It may start in the cities, but I can tell you that it is going to hit central Minnesota. Don’t be on the wrong side of this. This is all of us against the virus, not red states versus blue states. And if we all don’t act now, one day it will just be one big [COVID-19] fire."

"We have to figure out now how we’re going to get these hospitals through, not just today, not this week, not next week, but potentially months of being under siege with these [COVID-19] cases."

"It could take weeks for some places to see substantial increases. If we are successful in limiting transmission through the mitigation strategies, social distancing, then that should bring the numbers down. We'll just have to wait and see."

"We are all in the same COVID virus soup right now. No health care organization in the country is well suited, is well prepared to respond to this in terms of stockpiles of protective equipment."

"They're manufacturing as many N95 respirators as they possibly can. The suppliers are running 100% of the time. It's just that we never stockpiled anything. We all counted on just-in-time use. Suddenly when they put in an order of 50,000 rather than 5,000, all that capacity becomes terribly inadequate for the need."

"There is a real downside to [closing schools]. If we lose 20% of our nurses or any of the occupational areas we have in healthcare, this could add a really devastating impact on our delivery of healthcare during the middle of this pandemic situation."

"We're in a fight against this virus. We don't have time for double talk. We need straight talk."

"There are two kinds of people in this country: those who are in quarantine and those who will be soon.... I think the challenges are many, but I feel like we're poised to respond [to COVID-19]."

"On the [COVID-19) testing issue, this is one of our darkest moments in public health. I can't remember a time we've failed to do what we should have done. When South Korea can test more people in one day than we've been able to test in eight weeks, that should tell you we have a problem."

"If they're all getting infected and getting sick, we lose one of the most important ways to stop people from dying."

"You can't assume anymore that people are not capable of infecting you. In many cases they won't even know they're infected. [They] have to kind of assume the rest of the world is a coronavirus soup. If I don't want to end up swimming in that bowl, I need to find another place on the plate."

"It was obvious weeks ago to those of us on the front lines of public health that contact tracing at the very best was going to slow the [COVID-19] virus temporarily and never going to stop it from spreading widely across the US — never."

"Right now we're approaching this like it's the Washington, D.C., blizzard — for a couple days we're shut down. This is actually a coronavirus winter, and we're in the first week."

"No health care organization has gone out and stockpiled lots of personal protective equipment. They have always bought it on a just-in-time basis. So now we're paying the price for that."

"I think that it was unfortunate that a number of public health professionals said early on when COVID-19 first emerged that annual influenza was a much more serious problem. What they hadn't understood was that they were only watching the opening scene of this particular 'coronavirus winter,' as I call it. We can expect to see a large number of deaths moving forward."

"Assume this [COVID-19] virus is everywhere....The President was not lying when he got up in front of the country and described the small number of cases we had confirmed. That was true, but did it reflect the reality of what was happening? Absolutely not."

"What we need to do is to basically be able to share the news of what we know and don't know [about COVID-19], but then tell people what are we going to do about it, how are we going to respond. And that's what they're doing in Singapore."

"It's always been easy to be abstract when you're a public health person when something's happening in Africa or Asia or the Arabian peninsula. But now it's happening here, and we have to internalize this."

"This is a very important contribution to understanding both the natural history of COVID-19 clinical disease as well as the public health implications of viral shedding.... Early and potentially highly efficient transmission of the virus occurs before clinical symptoms or in conjunction with the very first mild symptoms."