Osterholm Quotes

"Screening individuals for their temperature at airports is really not an effective way to detect if someone has this [2019-nCoV] virus or not. I have likened it to fixing three of the five screen doors on your submarine."

"If we have one super shedder, that tells us we're going to have more super shedders. If there's one, there will be more."

"People sitting in waiting rooms, ERs, doctors' offices, waiting to be seen — this is where we really worry because we can have these super spreading events."

"The U.S. should be very concerned about it, but not because the fact that we're going to become clinically ill with it, but today many of the products and goods that we use in this country, including our medicines, medical equipment, etc. come every day from China."

"The thing we worry about as health officials is a thing called 'super spreading,' where we have certain individuals that are not just infectious but highly infectious."

"Each day our new findings are not good. This is beginning to look more like SARS every hour."

"You don't miss that [evidence of an nCoV superspreading event], even in a flu season. There are still a lot of questions that we don't have answers for."

"There's been no real information about what the likely source of the virus in the [Wuhan] market is....Until we understand which animal the coronavirus came from, we won’t understand if this outbreak is likely to continue. We need to shut off the source of the outbreak."

“The Chinese health authorities should get credit for jumping on this [novel coronavirus, but] we haven't learned anything yet about the likely animal reservoir and what that means for potential future transmission of this new virus to humans."

"I think that our ability to respond to these emergencies is moving in a more positive response generally… However, worldwide, we still have many areas of social and political unrest; the world is becoming less safe for public health work."

"Wuhan shouldn't have been a surprise; it's going to happen more and more. The world responded quickly to people flying out of Wuhan [as seen in Thailand]. However, it may have been more complicated if the virus emerged in a more internationally travelled city such as Beijing or Shanghai."

"The Chinese should be commended for their efforts in containing the [novel coronavirus] outbreak… but now we need to know more about the animal reservoir, so we know to prepare for future outbreaks."

"The viral hunter mindset sounds exciting, like something from a movie. There's an outbreak, you get a helicopter in, take blood and turn up the next day with a vaccine. But that’s science fiction . . . We already have viruses like MERS, SARS, Zika, and Nipah that we don't have countermeasures for."

“I feel confident at this point that the appropriate public health measures are being taken to both investigate the outbreak and to contain it as much as possible. And I think hopefully over the next several days it will become much clearer what the [causative] agent is."

"Anyone who tries to predict the flu season based on early information doesn’t understand influenza very well. The case numbers are up early, but it's such a difficult disease to predict—I don't think we can say anything about how severe it may be."

"Flu is here. Now is the time to get an immunization if you haven’t already."

"One day there will be another severe [influenza] pandemic like 1918 that will cost the world trillions of dollars in direct and indirect costs, not to mention the loss of millions of lives."

"I've seen more progress in developing a universal flu vaccine in the last three years than the last 30 years. There is very exciting research going on now in many parts of the world. It's the most fruitful time in influenza vaccine history."

"Right now we are not well prepared at all. But each day that we don’t have a pandemic is one day more we can prepare."

"The pandemic clock is ticking. We just don't know how much time we have."