US should prepare for an 18-month lockdown, says Neel Kashkari

The sobering outlook from Kashkari comes at a time when the US has already endured more than 16 million job losses in the past three weeks.

Moneycontrol News

April 13, 2020 / 08:47 IST

Neel Kashkari, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said the US should prepare of an 18-month shutdown to deal with the coronavirus outbreak that is wreaking havoc across the globe.

"This could be a long, hard road that we have ahead of us until we get to either an effective therapy or a vaccine. It’s hard for me to see a V-shaped recovery under that scenario," said the Indian origin Kashkari in an interview with CBS.

He said that the US should be looking at an 18-month strategy for the economy and health care system based on how other countries have responded to the pandemic.

A swift recovery is unlikely unless there is a "some health-care miracle", noted Kashkari, adding that the focus should now be on "finding ways of getting the people who are healthy, who are at lower risk back to work and then providing the assistance to those who are most at risk, who are going to need to be quarantined or isolated for the foreseeable future."

The sobering outlook from Kashkari comes at a time when the US has already endured more than 16 million job losses in the past three weeks.

Earlier this month, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had called for a nationwide shutdown in the US, when the number of COVID-19 cases had surpassed 2,00,000 in the country.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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