The Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience

Led by Danielle Allen and Glen Weyl, the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard has put out a Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience (I am a co-author along with others). It’s the most detailed plan I have yet seen on how to ramp up testing and combine with contact tracing and supported isolation to beat the virus.

One of the most useful parts of the roadmap is that choke points have been identified and solutions proposed. Three testing choke points, for example, are that nasal swaps make people sneeze which means that health care workers collecting the sample need PPE. A saliva test, such as the one just approved, could solve this problem. In addition, as I argued earlier, we need to permit home test kits especially as self-swab from near nasal appears to be just as accurate as nasal swabs taken by a nurse. Second, once collected, the swab material is classified as a bio-hazard which requires serious transport and storage safety requirements. A inactivation buffer, however, could kill the virus without killing the RNA necessary for testing and thus reduce the need for bio-safety techniques in transportation which would make testing faster and cheaper. Finally, labs are working on reducing the reagents needed for the tests.

Understanding the choke points is a big step towards increasing the quantity of tests.