On: COVID-19

Episode: N/A

Date: May 15 2020

Background: Economist.

Key Subjects:

• Finding a sustainable, less costly strategy to reduce virus transmission.
  • Suppression: lock-down is very costly (economic costs not sustainable).
  • Mitigation: transmission is very slow (> 1 year for the virus to spread through population).
• Long-term high level of costs can undermine democratic system, rule of law.
  • Immediate fiscal costs, reduced economic activity, mental burden, hardship.
• Alternative reasonably low-cost strategy: wide-spread testing.
  • Better information -> better behavior (no infection: work, infection: isolation).
  • Incentivize: production, testing and post-test behavior (rewards, lotteries, etc.)
  • Testing infrastructure to provide protection from future viruses as well.
  • Issues: reliability of tests, supply chain, chain of custody, scaling up, frequency of testing.
• Most people (not all) will do the right thing.
  • If you just let people know information, they generally will do things and it turns out okay.
• Don’t rush vaccination.
  • If it doesn’t go well, risk losing consensus on other mandatory vaccinations.