Joe Rogan Experience #1439 - Michael Osterholm

All right, here we go. Uh, so what you said when you sat down was absolutely perfect, that the timing could not have been better. Well, tell everybody what you do, Michael.

Well, thank you. I'm a, for a lack of a better term, a medical detective. I've spent my whole career tracking infectious diseases down, trying to stop them, trying to understand where they come from so we can make sure they don't happen in the first place, but most of all, trying to respond to situations just like this.

Just like this. And, um, just o- off the bat, how serious is this? Is this something that we need to be terrified of or is this overblown or... ho- how do you stand on this?

Well, first of all, you have to understand the timing of it in the sense that it's just beginning. And so in terms of what hurt, pain, suffering, death has happe- happened so far is really just beginning. Um, this is gonna unfold for months to come yet and that's, I think, what people don't quite yet understand. Um, what we saw in China, uh, I'm convinced as are many of my colleagues, as soon as they release all of these, uh, social distances, these mandated stay in homes, haven't left their home in weeks and weeks kind of thing, when they go back to work, they're on planes, trains, subways, buses, crowded spaces, manufacturing plants, even China is gonna come back again. And so this really is acting like an influenza virus, something that transmits very, very easily through the air. We now have data to show that you're infectious before you even get sick and in some cases quite highly infectious. Just breathing is all that you need to do. So from this perspective, I can understand why people would say, "Well, wait a minute, flu kills a lot more itself every year than this does." And I re- remind people that this is just the beginning. Probably the best guesstimate we have right now on what limited data we have would say this could be at least 10 to 15 times worse than the worst s- seasonal flu year we see.

10 to 15 times worse in terms of fatalities or...

Yeah, yeah. And, and just illnesses. In fact, I just, I brought some numbers. We, uh, conservatively estimate that this could, in, uh, require 48 million hospitalizations, 96 million, uh, cases actually occurring, over 480,000 deaths that can occur over the next three to seven months with this situation. So this is not one that to take lightly, and I think that's what I can understand if you say there's only been 10 deaths or 20 deaths or 50 deaths. Just remember, two weeks ago, we were talking about almost no cases in the United States, and now that we're testing for it and watching the spread as it's unfolding, uh, those numbers are going up astronomically. Three weeks ago, Italy was just living life just fine. Now they're literally in a virtual shutdown in the northern parts of Italy. And that's the challenge with an infectious disease like this. It can spread very quickly and it also can infect people. I think maybe to put this into modern terms, because this is something we think of often when we think of, of, you know, pre-antibiotic days, you know, the old time medicine. Um, we have an employee at our Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and she has a dear friend who lives in Milan, Italy, and she works at a hospital there. And she texted us to... this employee of ours last night, and this was an email that came out yesterday from one of their physicians in Milan at the largest hospital there. He said, "I just got a very disturbing message from a cardiologist at one of the Milan's largest hospitals. They're deciding who they have to let die. They aren't screening the staff anymore because they need all hands on deck, and they have very small areas of the hospital dedicated to non-COVID patients where they still screen doctors. Everybody else is dedicated to COVID patients, so even if they're positive, meaning that they're sick, they don't... and, but they don't have a severe cough or fever, then they have to work." Uh, he says that, that they're seeing an alarming number of cases in the 40-something range, and it's h- these are horrible cases. So we need to stop thinking that this is only an old person's disease. This is what's going to unfold not just in Wuhan, it's unfolding in Milan, it's unfolding here in, in Seattle, and this is what's gonna continue to rollingly unfold throughout the world.