Dr. Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, recognized the coronavirus would become a pandemic as early as January
This interview is the first in a series of conversations MarketWatch will conduct with some of the leading voices in the U.S. on the COVID-19 pandemic
On Jan. 20, just nine days after Chinese health authorities published the DNA sequence for a new coronavirus that had sickened dozens of people in China, Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, wrote in an email: “I’m certain this will cause our next pandemic.”....MUCH MORE
The next day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case of someone infected with what became known as COVID-19. Since then, as outbreaks intensified and the virus spread to Europe, and then the Americas, Osterholm, a flu expert with experience working in the CDC who heads up the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, has become one of the nation’s leading voices on the pandemic, weighing in on everything from masks to contact tracing.
Osterholm’s viewpoint is sobering. The 67-year-old expects the novel coronavirus to be present for the rest of his life. He doesn’t believe the wave theory (a first wave, a lull, followed by other waves) will apply to this pandemic. “That’s not what’s happening here,” he told MarketWatch in an interview.
MarketWatch: One of the things I’m pretty interested in is the talk and the hope around a vaccine. Do you think we have misconceptions about what it means when we have a vaccine?
Michael Osterholm: Everyone is looking at the vaccine as being a light switch: on or off. And I look at it as a rheostat, that’s going to take a long time, from turning it on from its darkest position to a lightest position. If you’re anticipating a light switch, you’re going to be concerned, confused, and in some cases very disappointed in what it might look like in those first days to months with a vaccine.
MarketWatch: I saw a piece in The Atlantic this week and I thought they positioned it well. They described it as the beginning of the end.
Osterholm: It won’t be. We will be dealing with this virus forever. Effective and safe vaccines and hopefully ones with some durability will be very important, even critical tools, in fighting it. But the whole world is going to be experiencing COVID-19 ‘til the end of time. We’re not going to be vaccinating our way out of this to eight-plus billion people in the world right now. And if we don’t get durable immunity, we’re potentially looking at revaccination on a routine basis, if we can do that. We’ve really got to come to grips with actually living with this virus, for at least my lifetime, and at the same time, it doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot about it....
I came to this realization on Monday:
Coronavirus, like the poor and the common cold will probably always be with us....
