How to reopen the US, according to Johns Hopkins and Harvard: Test 20 million people a day, hire an army of contact tracers, and expand healthcare coverage

• Experts from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, as well as the former FDA commissioner, have each released their plans for how to reopen the country safely.
• The plans suggest the US will need to massively ramp-up its disease testing and tracing capabilities to allow people to return to work and school.
• Collectively, the reports suggest the US will need: around 5 million tests a day by July, 100,000 public health workers to contact trace, and a "national infectious disease forecasting center."
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Most Americans are still stuck at home, but a trio of reports, out from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, are starting to lay a foundation for what reopening the country might look like, if done safely.

Though staying inside is certainly keeping more infections at bay right now, it's not without its costs.

Aside from the strain stay-at-home orders are putting on families, friends and communities, the newfound national quiet means the US is "hemorrhaging $100 billion to $350 billion a month," according to the new Harvard analysis, which was released on Monday.

A hasty, careless reopening would be a deadly disaster, though.

If everyone rushed back into the streets, hugging, kissing, shaking hands, and entirely abandoning social distancing measures, more than 300,000 people nationwide could die, according to federal documents from the Department of Health and Human Services, first released in a report from the Center for Public Integrity on Tuesday.

That's why any thoughtful plan to reopen the country must involve massive additional investments in public health, especially the testing and tracing of US coronavirus cases.

Here are the key topline suggestions from the experts for not only emerging from the coronavirus crisis successfully and safely, but also, as the Harvard report put it, becoming a "pandemic resilient" nation.

Harvard's Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience says more testing is fundamental to recovery

Broadly, the Harvard report suggests the task ahead of us is "bigger than most people realize."

"We need to massively scale-up testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine—together with providing the resources to make these possible for all individuals," the authors write.

Here's how:

• In the coming months, the US should rapidly ramp up its capacity to test for the coronavirus, eventually testing upwards of 2 to 6% of the population on any given day. (Currently, the US tests around 150,000 people per day, or about 0.04% of the population.) The plan starts with: 5 million tests per day by early June, and continues trending upward towards 20 million tests a day nationwide, by late July. That kind of widespread testing would be on a scale larger than Germany (testing 0.06% of the country per day, with more than 50,000 coronavirus tests), and would even surpass South Korea, which so far has tested more than 1.1% of the country, overall, for COVID-19.
• But "even this number may not be high enough to protect public health," the report authors warn.
• "Given that 40% of the economy is already open," the report says, "our first priority for a massively scaled up pandemic testing program should be to stabilize the essential workforce." Policy makers should listen to worker voices, the report also said, "because workers have expert knowledge about how to make their jobs safe and when safety-related rules are not being followed."
• Tests will eventually also be needed for others, including:

1. 1. Everyone with coronavirus symptoms, and their close contacts.
   2. People with presumed exposure (healthcare workers, essential workers, etc.)
   3. Nursing home residents and staff.
   4. Incarcerated people.
   5. Companies and schools.

• "Those who have tested negative within a very recent window and those who show immunity in reliable antibody tests (assuming these prove feasible) should be free to return to work," the report said.
• The authors were cautious about the idea of immunity cards or passports, though. "Certificates of immunity should be used only in contexts where people have equal access to ... testing and where a recent negative test result ... provides the same access to mobility as immunity," the report says. "Any other use of immunity certificates would be likely to violate constitutional equal protection requirements."
• In order to be able to follow 14-day quarantine orders successfully, people will need to be supported with more job protection and healthcare, the report added.
• The cost of testing and tracing at this scale is an estimated $50 - 300 billion over two years, which, the authors write is still far cheaper than "the economic cost of continued collective quarantine," at $100 to 350 billion a month.
• A Pandemic Testing Board should also be established by the federal government, the report suggests, with a National Director of Testing Supply appointed to help ramp up testing efforts. "In virtually every successful historical example of such rapid coordination, a central authority has set goals and ensured that each part of the chain meets the interlocking goals required for the chain to succeed," the report authors add.

There's just one problem, though: the Harvard approach relies on all coronavirus tests being accurate, but some are not

Swab-the-nose-and-throat coronavirus testing delivers about 30% false negatives, which means that roughly 3 in 10 people who have the virus could wrongly assume they don't after they're tested, and then could go on to infect others at work or at school.

Coronavirus blood tests, which are meant to determine whether a person has been infected in the past with the coronavirus and developed disease-fighting antibodies, have so far performed much worse than the swab tests, with some operating at just 30% accuracy, the New York Times recently reported.

Johns Hopkins' 'National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US' adds an army of contact tracers to the Harvard testing plan

The goal of deploying thousands of contact tracers across the US, the report authors write, is to "find every COVID-19 case in the midst of a national epidemic ... and then work quickly to contain spread through intensive case and contact tracing interventions," by warning others who might've been exposed to those sick people to stay home.

"This entire operation has never been done before," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday, as he announced during a news conference that his state would be partnering with Johns Hopkins to roll out a new army of contact tracers in the tri-state area, to the tune of $10 million.

"You've never heard the words testing, tracing, isolate before," Cuomo said. "No one has. We've just never done this."

Here's how the plan could work, nationwide:

• Hire "an extra 100,000 contact tracers across the United States," the report says. "While this figure may be stunning, it is still the equivalent of less than half the number [of contact tracers] employed in Wuhan," the authors point out.
• Contact tracers will need to be trained by existing state and territorial public health departments on: disease transmission, principles of case isolation and quarantine, ethics of public health data collection and use, risk communication, cultural sensitivity, and more.
• The plan could provide jobs for: former government employees, retired public health and public safety workers & medical personnel, medical and public health students, Medical Reserve Corps or Peace Corps members, community health workers, and others "seeking employment—especially those who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19." People with good communication and interviewing skills would be especially well-qualified for the task.
• The new workforce will cost the US an estimated $3.6 billion, and the report authors urge Congress to fund this idea in its fourth stimulus package.

• The cost of not tracing is also high: "It is estimated that each infected person can, on average, infect two to three others," the authors write. "This means that if one person spreads the virus to three others, that first positive case can turn into more than 59,000 cases in 10 rounds of infections."

Apple and Google have also released their own plans to make contact tracing and surveillance happen more automatically on our phones

Apple and Google are both working on new apps and other press-of-a-button opt-in functionalities for phones that would harness Bluetooth technology to track where we've been, and then warn others who've been near us, in the event we get sick with the coronavirus, in a new brand of push notification-friendly contact tracing.

The companies promise that "user privacy and security" will be paramount in any forthcoming app design.

Other countries have already tried out similar Bluetooth-reliant tracing techniques, but they're not always very successful, as you need a large percentage of the population to use them in order to have any major impact on transmission.

Scott Gottlieb's 'Road Map to Reopening' from the American Enterprise Institute adds in the element of a weather forecasting service for pandemics

• Gottlieb calls it a "National Infectious Disease Forecasting Center," and says "this permanent federal institution would function similarly to the National Weather Service, providing a centralized capability for both producing models and undertaking investigations to improve methods used to advance basic science, data science, and visualization capabilities."
• Gottlieb also cautioned that we should not rush to return the US to business-as-usual, even as some restrictions are lifted. As schools and businesses reopen, "teleworking should continue where convenient" he said, and "social gatherings should continue to be limited to fewer than 50 people wherever possible."

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