Dr. Michael Osterholm reflects on COVID-19 outbreak: 5 years later

(FOX 9) - Dr. Michael Osterholm is a world-renowned epidemiologist, Regents professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He sounded the warning alarms in January 2020 about the dangers of COVID-19 and says he was met with some opposition from colleagues.

We sat down to talk with Dr. Osterholm about what he learned from the pandemic and his thoughts on preparing for another one.

COVID-19 pandemic: In retrospect

What we know:

Post-COVID and Pre-COVID. Those are two phrases many of us use now to define time. And the shift began for Minnesota in March 2020. A well-known expert in infectious disease from Minnesota had already been warning of the potential death toll and the number of years it could take for the pandemic to lift.

"I remember on March 10th of 2020 I was on the Joe Rogan Podcast," says Dr. Michael Osterholm, reflecting that at the time he didn’t realize how many millions of people his interview would reach. "And I really laid out all of this information. I predicted, at that point, that we could see in the next 18 months, 800,000 deaths in this country on the show that day," he added.

"And you would’ve thought that I had offended every one of my colleagues, or at least many of them, because they all thought that was just so scary and so, you know, inappropriate, if not irresponsible, to have said that," he said.  "Well, unfortunately, 18 months later we had 800,000 deaths and so it was on track," added Osterholm.

When we asked him why there was so much dissension in the medical community, he said it was because they hadn’t seen anything like this before and the 1918 Spanish Flu was so long ago, that it had only been experienced through history books.

We asked Osterholm about public resistance to the lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccines and he remarked that there were lessons learned looking forward.

"I can’t say that I envisioned it exactly as it happened, but I surely saw the fact that we didn’t have all the answers and that we needed as a public health community to state just that and just say, this is what we know and this is what we don’t know," says Osterholm.

"I think one of the things, the lessons that public health could have and should have learned is how do we communicate to the public the uncertainty and I think if there was one operative word that was missing from our lexicon it was humility," he says. "Science is the pursuit of truth.  And I think that’s a very important concept to get across to people. You know, we’re still learning," he added.

"I do live by one axiom and that is, the pandemic clock is ticking. We just don’t know what time it is," says Osterholm.

The start of a pandemic

Timeline:

On March 6, 2020, the first positive test was confirmed in Minnesota. On March 8, 2020, a second positive test came in. And on March 10, 2020, a third Minnesotan was confirmed and hospitalized in critical condition.

By March 15, 2020, Governor Walz announced the closure of all schools K-12. By March 25, 2020 the state announced 287 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and signed an executive order for all people residing in Minnesota to shelter in place.

Dr. Osterholm is releasing a book this summer called "The Big One" about preparing for the future deadly pandemics.

For an extended version of our interview with Dr. Osterholm, head to the FOX 9 YouTube page.