Despite the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) reaching near all-time pre-pandemic highs, a Chinese coronavirus advisor to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden says that locking down the country for multiple weeks could aid in "bringing back the economy."
In an interview with Yahoo! Finance on Wednesday, Biden "COVID-19 Task Force member" Dr. Michael Osterholm said that if the federal government subsidized pretty much everyone and everything besides larger companies, the U.S. could lock down for four to six weeks.
"We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” Osterholm said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks."
What does Osterholm mean by "we could lock down for four to six weeks?" Is he intimating that a lockdown is the "Task Force's" preferred method of combatting the coronavirus? Why not wait for a supposedly fast-arriving vaccine in order to avoid spending trillions of dollars in relief?
"We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that," Osterholm also said.
Here's video of Osterholm's interview with Yahoo! Finance:
Judging by the numbers, the economy is already coming back if you look at the DJIA. The DJIA's all-time high was reached back in February when the DJIA was at 29,551.42. As of this writing, the DJIA is at 29,286.19, and that's with the market being down a little over 100 points at midday on Thursday. Back in August, both the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P hit all-time highs.
It seems the economy has already recovered. It's individual state's governors that need to allow people to at least attempt to get back to work, if they haven't already.
H/T: CNBC