Michael Osterholm is the guy you call when you want to find out if that measles outbreak is going to explode or if humans should be concerned about bird flu. 

As director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, he’s been predicting a global pandemic for years. 

In some circles, he’s known as Dr. Doom for his dire predictions about diseases. But the initial rumblings in late 2019 about a mysterious respiratory illness circulating in China didn’t worry Osterholm too much at first. 

“This is likely to be a coronavirus, not an influenza virus,” he thought. “And if that’s the case, we already had experienced SARS and MERS. They were not infectious enough that we couldn’t shut them down using our traditional public health approach,” he said. 

But a few weeks into 2020, Osterholm’s first blush take on the COVID-19 virus changed. It was clear that this new virus was easily transmissible. His infectious disease research center put out a statement in late January 2020. 

“It was on its way. Get ready for it. Move. And I can remember … thinking, ‘My God, what’s coming down the pike,’” Osterholm recalls. 

Lingering illness

What was coming down the pike were more than 7 million COVID related deaths worldwide. More than 16,000 were in Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. 

And there was a growing number of people who endured fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness and other neurological symptoms long after their initial COVID infection was over.

Eventually that group of people included Osterholm himself. 

Fourteen months after the pandemic, Osterholm was fully vaccinated and he regularly wore a mask — except for a brief period with his friends on his birthday in 2021. Two days later he, a friend and his partner came down with COVID. 

Osterholm said he wasn’t severely ill but the effects lingered. 

“I couldn’t remember the names of things. We were here at home and I was asked a question about what I might like to drink,” he said. “I couldn’t remember the name of it, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m getting Alzheimer’s.’”

What lay ahead for Osterholm were months of extreme fatigue and brain fog. He says the mental anguish that came with those symptoms was the hardest part.

“I had a job to do. We were in the middle of a pandemic. You don’t, as a fire chief, decide to quit putting out the fire because you might be tired that day,” he said.

But Osterholm said his experience with COVID helped him better understand so many of the diseases he’s studied in his career that trigger an excessive immune system response.

And with so many people simultaneously experiencing long COVID, Osterholm said it’s pushed the medical field to better understand what can sometimes be written off as patients' imagined or ill-defined conditions.   

“Hopefully, this offers hope to [people with chronic immune diseases] too, that now there is a new effort being made to understand these immune system responses that are just out of whack,” he said. 

Osterholm’s new concerns

The pandemic may be in the rearview mirror, but Osterholm said watching public health programs be dismantled under the Trump administration is even more emotionally challenging than navigating long COVID. 

He points to President Donald Trump’s attempts to eliminate USAID, which administers a global HIV program Osterholm helped create in the 2000s. He’s also worried that a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meeting about the next flu vaccine was cancelled. 

Meanwhile, measles is spreading in nine Texas counties and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has expressed skepticism about vaccines. 

Osterholm worries about how quickly the number of cases is growing.

“It’s a harbinger of things to come,” he said. “We have created an environment where routine immunization of children is no longer something that we can count on happening. This is not a prediction to scare people. It’s a prediction to say, ‘Look, it this is going to happen if we don’t do something different to better understand the importance of these vaccines.’”

COVID missteps

Osterholm acknowledged that public health officials’ missteps during the COVID-19 pandemic eroded public trust in vaccines. 

For instance, the first COVID vaccines were highly effective. But Osterholm worried they would only offer short-term protection. 

He said many health officials nevertheless made vaccines sound like a silver bullet.  That wasn’t the case, and some vaccinated people still got sick. 

“Had we said, ‘You know, [the vaccines] really worked well for these first months. A booster is really important right now,’ think how different people would have perceived these vaccines,” he said. “Instead, they were made to get vaccines, they were told to get vaccines, that they would protect them and then they didn’t after months."

What’s more, Osterholm said a more targeted approach to lockdowns might have been better received by the public. Instead of lengthy lockdowns geared at reining in highly contagious diseases, Osterholm advocates for short periods of isolation correlated to hospital capacity. 

“I had urged early on that we adopt basically a snow day approach where as long as we have health care facilities at 120 percent capacity, that’s unacceptable … we’ll be home a couple days,” he said. “The public would have been much more involved. They would have been much more engaged."

Osterholm worries the next pandemic could come any day. But he;s hopeful that there are still lessons public health officials can learn from the COVID-19 pandemic that could help manage future outbreaks.

Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.