Massive testing program could hold keys to ending coronavirus crisis

A massive nationwide testing program could help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and could provide a roadmap for rolling back the extensive social distancing measures implemented across the United States and around the world, according to Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer and Dr. Raj Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation and former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Speaking on April 8, Romer and Shah expanded on their April 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which they advocated for a nation-wide strategy to develop and distribute quick-result COVID-19 tests for the entire population. Focus would first start on providing tests for frontline healthcare workers as right now “when they come to work, none of them know if they are silent asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19,” Romer explained, which threatens to strain the already stretched US healthcare system, should more doctors and nurses contract the virus. “We can’t take the risk that we lose more of them to the disease,” Romer said, necessitating that these workers are tested “every single day” with results produced within minutes.

Once these tests are available for critical frontline workers, authorities can then expand to other high contact individuals such as police, fire, and ambulance departments, as well as pharmacists, grocery store clerks, and sanitation workers. While these individuals would be prioritized, “the ultimate goal is to test everyone within two weeks,” Romer said, as only with the accurate picture of the virus can authorities “start to remove in sequence all of these social distancing measures.”

Shah explained that previous experience fighting the Ebola outbreak in Africa from 2014-2016 demonstrated the critical need for accurate and widespread testing. Much like coronavirus, authorities were initially handicapped by the fact that it would often take several days for someone who was showing potential symptoms to be confirmed as positive for the virus. Once testing was developed that returned results within four hours, efforts to control the spread of the virus “were so fast that we actually didn’t use all the Ebola treatment units that we had built,” according to Shah.

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Πηγή: atlanticcouncil.org