Michael Osterholm has Covid.
That’s not the interesting part.
You may remember Osterholm. If not: he’s an Minneapolis epidemiologist who is widely quoted on Covid, helped advise Joe Biden’s transition team, and runs a epidemic policy research center at the University of Minnesota. He’s a big kahuna in public health.
And when the epidemic began three years ago, Osterholm seemed briefly to be among the more rational voices. In March 2020, he wrote a prescient op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Facing Covid-19 reality: a national lockdown is no cure.”
But Osterholm did not stay calm for long. Five months later, he and another writer demanded not just that lockdowns continue but that the federal government require them nationally - and tighten them:
We should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers… people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.
(Osterholm did not offer details the frequency of the hand-washing, or how the government would enforce it. Hygiene monitors in every bathroom? Drones? Federally paid paper towel wipers? The mind reels.)
Again, Osterholm wrote those words in August 2020, long after the worst-case scenarios of hospital overrun and Covid striking down healthy adults - much less children - had proven false.
That’s not the interesting part either, though it is the beginning of the interesting part.
The interesting part is this:
Last week, on the March 23 podcast where he talked about getting Covid, Osterholm also talked about the failed precautions he had taken to avoid getting Covid. To wit:
On March 10, he and his partner Fern Peterson ate at their $3.4 million apartmentwith a friend to celebrate Osterholm’s 70th birthday. (Yes, a $3.4 million apartment. In Minneapolis. Still not the interesting part.)
Before they met, Osterholm, Fern, and their friend all made sure they had not been exposed to anyone in the five previous days who had Covid. They checked to be sure they “had no symptoms whatsoever, not even a sniffle.” Then they each took a rapid Covid test.
On the podcast, Osterholm referred to these preparations, without apparent irony, as “the Osterholm protocol, as it's become known.”
Osterholm’s efforts to avoid getting Covid went past his eponymous protocol.
When he, his wife, and the friend left the apartment, they donned masks. Or, to be more accurate, N95 respirators. Osterholm made sure listeners knew his was “face fitted,” strapped tightly to his cheeks.
Then they went to a “venue” and:
put our N95s on before we walked in. We're there for an hour and 45 minutes in a large room with very few people. It was a small venue but yet separated. We then left the venue, took our N95s off when we actually got to the car.
Sounds like a blast! No doubt the other “patrons” at the “venue” were thrilled to see the respirator-clad threesome out for exactly 105 minutes of fun on a Friday night.
—
By Sunday, though, Osterholm, Fern, and his friend were feeling sick. And by Monday, March 13, they tested positive for Covid.
Did I mention that all three were mRNA vaccinated?
And boosted.
And boosted.
And boosted.
Not a misprint. As Osterholm explained, “between the three of us, we had 15 doses of vaccine, five each.”
Which works out to five doses per infection.
—
Now Osterholm is suffering. Not so much from The Covid - he complained on the podcast he felt like he’d “been hit by a train,” but his actual symptoms were sniffles and a scratchy throat - as from his feelings about The Covid:
I now understand what it feels like, where you're asking yourself, what did I do? How did I do this? What's wrong? And you didn't fail. You didn't fail then. I didn't fail. And yet I know that I feel with this virus that somehow I should have done something better, something different.
Yes, Mike, you should have done something different!
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