‘Road map’ to recovery report: 20 million coronavirus tests per day needed to fully open economy – By Teri Whitcraft, Bill Hutchinson and Nadine Shubailat (ABC News) / April 19 2020
The United States has conducted 3.7 million tests for COVID-19.
With President Donald Trump saying he wants to lift stay-at-home novel coronavirus orders and open up parts of the country, more than 45 economists, social scientists, lawyers and ethicists say there’s a growing consensus pointing to a major step necessary to put Americans back to work: dramatically upscaling testing.
In a report titled “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience,” set to be released on Monday, a blue-ribbon panel of thought leaders across the political spectrum called COVID-19 “a profound threat to our democracy, comparable to the Great Depression and World War II.”
“It’s a moment for a ‘Can Do America’ to really show up and put itself to work,” Danielle Allen, lead author of the report and a professor at Harvard University’s Edmond J.Safra Center on Ethics, told ABC News.
The report says that ending the quarantine safely will require testing, tracing, and supported isolation, a combination known by the acronym TTSI.
“What people need to recognize is that a massively scaled-up testing, tracing and supported isolation system is the alternative to national quarantine,” Allen said. “We all had to learn PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] and we all had to learn about flattening the curve … now we have to learn about TTSI.”
A medical professional collects a sample after administering a coronavirus test to a patient at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site, April 6, 2020 in Jericho, New York.
Al Bello/Getty Images
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