ExtricationHere’s How We Extricate Ourselves from This Lockdown
No politician or public-health expert can say when the novel coronavirus pandemic, and attendant lockdowns and social distancing, will end. But there is a roadmap—actually, a competing array of them—for extricating the United States from social isolation. Olivia Messer writes for the Daily Beastthat public-health experts surveyed by the Daily Beast said there were three main things authorities need to be able to provide—effectively, affordably, and with quick results—to the American public before it’s safe to send at least some people back to work and into public life.
First are millions more diagnostic tests, which can tell if someone currently has COVID-19. Then come antibody tests, which can determine if people recently had it and may have developed enough of the right kind of immune response to offer some protection from illness. Finally, authorities need more robust “contact-tracing” to track who might have been exposed to the virus and prevent them from spreading it further.
A much-discussed problematic and delayed rollout in the United States has kept diagnostic tests expensive, out of reach, and in some cases ineffective. But one of President Trump’s top advisers on coronavirus testing, Adm. Brett Giroir, told Bloomberg News in an interview on Saturday that the U.S. is working on rapidly improving diagnostic testing in order to reopen the economy, including both widespread surveillance to catch new flareups and testing of people who have specific symptoms. Giroir said that by May the U.S. will be in the “ballpark” of the diagnostic capacity it needs.
