ArgumentHow Recovered COVID-19 Patients Might Help Fight the Pandemic

Published 26 March 2020

President Trump is growing so worried about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic that he’s talking about drastic action, including ending the lockdown in states that haven’t seen lots of infections. Stewart Bakers writes that he’s right to be worried and right to be looking for dramatic solutions. There are responsible solutions which “might address the underlying concern. Instead of easing the lockdown state by state, we could do it person by person. Specifically, we could end the lockdown for people who have already recovered from COVID-19.”

President Trump is growing so worried about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic that he’s talking about drastic action, including ending the lockdown in states that haven’t seen lots of infections. Stewart Bakers writes in Lawfare that he’s right to be worried and right to be looking for dramatic solutions. He may even be well served in this case by his skepticism about giving government public health experts the last word on fateful economic decisions, for reasons I’ll discuss. “But ending the lockdown in states with low infection numbers is the wrong answer when we haven’t tested widely; many of these states almost certainly have an underground contagion that will explode as soon as the lockdown is lifted,” Baker writes, adding:.

There are, however, responsible alternatives that might address the underlying concern. Instead of easing the lockdown state by state, we could do it person by person. Specifically, we could end the lockdown for people who have already recovered from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus. These people offer something we badly need right now: a workforce that probably can’t get infected and probably can’t infect others. I say probably because there is plenty we don’t know. But there is reason to believe that people who recover from COVID-19 pose much less risk of infecting others and face less risk of being reinfected themselves. There’s still much uncertainty on both counts, but that’s the way to bet.

Which means that recovered COVID-19 patients could be a vital resource for public health and for the economy.

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Third, this system requires a mechanism to enforce rules that end the lockdown for some people and not others. Because we will need to rely on physician letters initially, we should set uniform standards for representations from doctors. And the government should make clear that false claims of recovery can be criminally prosecuted as fraud. (If this proves insufficient, states and the private sector could issue 3-D barcodes to help stores, hospitals and lockdown enforcers to verify claims of recovery using a mobile phone. Similar systems are currently used across Asia.)