As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the United States – and the world – Dr. Oz dropped by CBS Sports Radio to discuss the virus and how to best navigate the coming months.
“If we do this right, then we’ll be able to start on this virus pretty quickly,” Dr. Oz said on The Zach Gelb Show. “Certainly by June – that sounds like a long time away – but within the next two months we’ll be able to slow it down so much so that everybody will catch up to it and then we’ll be able to loosen everything up and it’ll go back to life as much as possible, back to normal. But if we don’t do it correctly, then we could run into a catastrophe like Italy is facing where you have a tsunami of patients heading into underprepared emergency rooms and that would be hard for our medical system to deal with.”
Dr. Oz’s advice is consistent with many health experts. If you’re 60 or older, especially with underlying conditions, avoid travel. People of all ages should avoid large crowds.
“Our best guess is that half the population is going to get coronavirus in the next year,” Dr. Oz said. “There’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get it and you’ll have no problem with it. Eighty percent of the people – especially young, healthy folks – [have] very few issues. It’s may be a little bit worse in terms of mortality rate than seasonal flu, but not a catastrophe.”
While it is unknown when the virus will go away, Dr. Oz said June is his best guess.
“You’re not going to be able to party it up for two months,” he said, “but we’ll be back to relative normalcy, I’m hoping, as we catch up to this virus.”