Coronavirus: How mass testing could reopen the country
With “flatten the curve” now a national mantra, a “new rallying cry has emerged,” said Denise Chow in NBCNews.com: “test and trace.” Experts agree the coronavirus won’t simply “go away,” as President Trump once suggested, and a vaccine could be more than a year away. That means the only way America can return to quasi-normalcy in coming months is by testing citizens for the virus in massive numbers, then tracing and quarantining those infected and their recent contacts so the uninfected can return to work in relative safety. That’s how South Korea (population 52 million) kept its Covid-19 deaths to only 225 (compared with more than 26,000 in the U.S. thus far) while avoiding sweeping lockdowns. Before Americans get too excited, said Umair Irfan in Vox.com, some experts estimate we’ll need to conduct roughly 30 million tests per day to reopen the economy, with the entire population being tested roughly every two weeks. “Half measures will only prolong the problem,” causing a wave of fresh outbreaks that will result in repeated lockdowns. Yes, conducting that many tests will require “a national mobilization on the scale of a world war,” which only the federal government could properly organize and control. But when it comes to testing, our choice is stark and binary: “Go big or stay home.”
A new testing option has emerged, said Carolyn Johnson in The Washington Post. “Serology testing” detects the presence of antibodies, not the virus itself, showing that the patient has been infected in the past and is now probably immune. Since it’s now thought that 25 to 50 percent of infections result in very mild or no symptoms, that number could be in the millions. Coronavirus antibody testing would “divide the world into those who’ve had it and aren’t at risk anymore—and those who are.” The tests could easily be performed by pharmacy technicians, said Drew Harris in The Philadelphia Inquirer, who could then issue those with antibodies an “Immunity Passport”—a “hard-to-fake card or wristband”—that would enable them to return to work and public places.
Sounds great, said David Lim in Politico .com, but we don’t yet know for sure that a coronavirus infection confers future immunity, or for how long. Then there are the ethical questions. If we only allow those with positive antibody tests to return to work, we create a powerful incentive for the desperate unemployed to either lie about their status or, worse, “purposefully try to become infected.” There are cultural obstacles, too, said Ben Shapiro in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We are not South Korea. Even if we could develop a program that intrusively tested 330 million Americans and required those infected to identify their contacts, “are we willing to submit ourselves to one?”
If we want to “limit the devastation of our nation’s health and economy,” then we have no choice, said former CDC chief Dr. Tom Frieden in The New York Times. Like travel bans, face masks, and elbow bumps, widespread testing of the population is just one more thing we’ll have to get used to. If we want to avoid widespread illness and death, said Ezra Klein in Vox.com, we have two choices. Either we accept an economic contraction on the scale of the Great Depression, or we give up our “mistrustful, individualistic culture” and accept a testing program of “shocking size and intrusiveness.” Either way, “there is no normal for the foreseeable future.”