Mike Osterholm

It was never about preventing infections because you weren't going to prevent them.

People were going to get infected over three years.

It's just that simple.

The question was, how could you maximize the opportunity to then have good medical care?

And that was just lost.

And I think next time we get into the pandemic situation, we have to understand we could be in this for several years.

Early on in the pandemic, Eric, as you know, I took a lot of criticism from my colleagues for being sensationally crazy.

And I was on Joe Rogan on March 10th of 2020.

And I said at that time, I really honestly believe we could see 800,000 deaths in the next 18 months.

And I'm telling you, you should have seen my inbox for, you know, why are you doing this, scaring people?

And it turned out that 18 months later, we were just short of 800,000 deaths.

And that's what people didn't envision is this long term, not a hurricane, but we're talking about a really, you know, an infectious disease blizzard that lasted three years.

Unfortunately, you're right.

And let me just add one little piece to my last answer because you asked me and I didn't answer it.

It was about kids.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, what people didn't realize is the variants made all the difference between night and day with kids.

You know, there were in the first three years of the pandemic, we had roughly 1,559 kids die in this country.

If you look at the first year, it was only 199, and I'd say only, and it's still a tragedy, but 87% of the deaths in kids occurred in year two and year three.