With more than 60,000 Americans dead, 25 million out of a job, and the economy nearing outright collapse thanks to the coronavirus, it’s understandable that governors nationwide are itching to lift lockdown restrictions and get everyone back to work..
Although any reopening will rightly unfold in phases, three essential steps are needed before anything like normal economic activity can resume. All three require the kind of federal leadership that has so far been absent.
The most important step is to ramp up coronavirus testing. Without adequate screening, it’s impossible to know who’s been infected, who’s vulnerable and how widely the virus has spread.
Screening everyone with COVID-19 symptoms or exposure will require a substantial increase in testing capacity, widespread use of rapid diagnostics and intricate coordination. Unfortunately, the White House has abdicated this responsibility. Its plan to boost testing leaves all the hard work to the states and insists the federal government is merely the “supplier of last resort.” A serious national testing strategy should instead prod laboratories to create better and faster screening; offer companies the financial and logistical support they need to produce more test kits; and monitor cases to ensure that tests are distributed where they’re most needed and make sure all 50 states are screening adequately and reporting their results.
A second challenge is equipment. Across the country, doctors and nurses still report a shortage of basic protective gear such as masks and gowns. States can’t keep testing programs going without predictable supplies of materials like swabs and reagents. Getting the public to adhere to federal guidelines on face shielding would be a lot easier if more — and better — protective masks were easily available.
Such shortages are solvable, but they demand a fundamental rethink from the White House. So far, the Trump administration has been erratically invoking the Defense Production Act to harangue individual companies and labs into making the stuff it deems most important, with little attention to their capacity or competence for the job. This hasn’t worked. It’s exactly the wrong approach.
The government should instead offer purchase guarantees for essential equipment. This would reduce uncertainty about future demand and incentivize companies to make the longer-term investments — such as retraining staff and retooling factories — needed to ramp up production.
A final prerequisite is to develop a large-scale plan to trace the contacts of those who’ve been infected and encourage them to get tested and isolate themselves. This is hard enough for run-of-the-mill infectious diseases. A global pandemic poses immense challenges.
If the Trump administration has a plan for expanding this capacity, it has kept uncharacteristically quiet about it. As a start, the Department of Health and Human Services should stipulate how the government intends to help states hire and train tracers on a large scale; work with technology companies to coordinate this process nationally; and encourage widespread adoption of tracing apps.
Getting the economy back to “normal” is likely to be a long and painful process. But these initial efforts would help health authorities get a grip on the pandemic and lay the groundwork for more ambitious steps to come. All of it should’ve been done already. It isn’t too late, even now, for the administration to show some leadership.
