Tests must be as cheap and as easy to get as a latte, says Nobel Prize winner
Call for US and UK to develop new kits in attempt to help cut economic disruption
CORONAVIRUS tests should be as cheap and available as a “morning latte” and taken just as regularly if we are to beat the pandemic, a Nobel Prizewinning economist has recommended.
The US and UK should be working towards producing quick-and-easy testing kits that are taken every morning at drive-throughs, Paul Romer, a leading expert on technological growth and policy, told The Sunday Telegraph.
Mr Romer says $10 (£8.70) kits that people took daily would help us better appreciate the scale of the outbreak and contain it in a much shorter time.
“The current plan is for the US government to spend something in the order of $1trillion to protect the economy. If it spends just 10 per cent of that on scaling out and improving tests for Covid-19, we could soon reach the goal of frequent, universal testing that imposed only a tiny disruption,” he said.
“Getting a test should be like getting a latte – something everyone does each day that takes only a few minutes, and is available at a drive-up window.”
Britain and the US have some of the lowest testing rates in the developed world – 600 and 100 per million respectively. For comparison, South Korea has tested 3,700 people per million.
Until this week, testing in the US had been done manually, with individual labs performing only 40 to 60 a day. In Britain, sufferers report failing to even qualify for the test.
A number in the UK, who presented with the symptoms, said they were told by doctors they could not get tested unless they were hospitalised. The slow pace has made it impossible for officials in both countries to get a true picture of the spread and created a gap in the public health response.
“(Affordable testing) is the only way to achieve the dual goals of saving lives and protecting the livelihoods of all citizens,” said Mr Roper, who is a professor at New York University and corecipient of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2018.
“For the economy to recover, it must
‘If we had enough testing, anyone found to be negative in the past 24 hours could go to work, restaurants or take a flight’
be safe for people to go back to work and produce. But for this to happen, everybody has to get tested, and tested repeatedly,” he said.
“If we had enough testing, we could say that anyone who has a negative test result in the last 24 hours can go to work, go to restaurants, take a flight,” he added, stressing that the results would come back positive even if a person is asymptomatic.
He pointed to an experiment trialled in the small town of Vò in northern Italy. Researchers tested each inhabitant twice, leading to the discovery of the decisive role of asymptomatic carriers in the spread of the virus. When the study began, on March 6, there were at least 90 infected in Vò. For days now, there have been no new cases.
Italy has tested aggressively country-wide, which could explain why its confirmed cases are higher than almost any other country outside of China.
Mr Romer blamed the lag in testing in the US on the Trump administration’s downplaying of the virus.
“At a time when the president was publicly dismissing the seriousness of the threat, the inevitable result is that everyone stuck to business as usual,” he said. “Everyone was afraid to lead.”