Biden virus advisers nix national U.S. lockdown

WASHINGTON • The head of President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisory board said Friday there was no plan to shut the country down and that the new administration’s approach will be targeted at specific areas.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general tapped to lead the board, said doctors have learned a lot about how the virus spreads and what steps to reduce risk are effective.

“We’re not in a place where we’re saying shut the whole country down. We got to be more targeted,” Murthy said on Good Morning America.

Another member of the team, Dr. Michael Osterholm, suggested in a Yahoo Finance interview that the country could cover individual companies’ and local governments’ losses for a four- to six-week lockdown to drive numbers down.

He clarified on ABC that he did not discuss a lockdown with anyone on the advisory board and he did not think there was a national consensus for it.

Neither Murthy nor Dr. Celine Gounder, another Biden adviser, who appeared on CNN, embraced the idea.

“Right now the way we should be thinking about this is more like a series of restrictions that we dial up or down depending on how bad spread is taking place in a specific region,” Murthy said.

Murthy cited New York City as an example where health officials are targeting COVID interventions “down to the zip code.”

In his campaign for re-election, President Donald Trump warned without evidence that Biden would seek to lock down the country. The Trump administration pushed hard for the country’s economy to reopen. Coronavirus cases spiked over the summer and are increasing again around the country.

The current rise has been accompanied by increasing hospitalizations. The onset of winter, with people more likely to congregate indoors, will only worsen the trend, experts say.

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a month-long stay-at-home advisory, and Detroit’s public schools called a halt to in-person instruction as more than a dozen U.S. states reported a doubling of new COVID-19 cases in the past two weeks.

Murthy said the Biden team’s priority will be to stop the spread of the virus and focus on hard-hit populations like nursing homes and prisons. Increasing testing capacity will be key.

“We still don’t have adequate testing,” he said.