How you can save lives and the economy during COVID-19 pandemic

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer has set out a plan that will save both lives and also the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According towards the latest estimates UK economic growth could fall by 1.5 percent between January and March before plummeting by 13 percent in the following quarter, with little sign of respite to be found.

With the country in lockdown several industries have ground to a halt with lots of healthy workers unable to work. 

But based on Romer there could be a means out.

Catastrophic, long-term failure

Writing in the Ny Times alongside Alan M. Garber he warned that current strategies governments now utilize are “contradictory and risk catastrophic, long-term failure”.

He said social distancing is an emergency measure that “will save lives but brings business activities to a near-halt”, with fiscal stimulus also unlikely to stave off economic collapse.

“To protect our way of life,” Romer argues, “we need to shift within a month or two to a targeted approach that limits multiplication from the virus but still lets most people return to work and resume their daily activities”. 

“This approach uses two complementary strategies. The first relies on tests to target social distancing more precisely. The second relies on protective gear that stops the transmission of the virus. 

“Adopting these strategies will require a massive rise in our capacity for coronavirus testing and a improvement in the production of personal protective gear.”

Testing and protective gear

The UK government has been criticised for being slow to supply frontline NHS workers with the protective gear they require, with the country's failure to handle mass testing also condemned. 

British paediatrician and former WHO director Anthony Costello said: “We have 44 molecular virology labs in the UK.

“If they were doing 400 tests each day, we would be up to Germany's amounts of testing – and that's perfectly feasible.”

A Downing Street spokesperson has insisted the government continues to be hoping to get to 25,000 tests a day over the following fortnight.

Asked why the united kingdom was falling to date lacking Germany's testing of 70,000 people a day, No 10 blamed “getting all of the equipment they need to conduct these tests at any given time when everybody in the world wants them”.

But Dr Costello said: “They only allowed non-Public Health England laboratories to start testing two weeks ago, but that was following the strategy shifted to stopping community tests.”

Our economy is going to be dead

Without more testing and protective gear the UK will continue to depend on social distancing which could keep the majority of the country isolated and out of work for several months. 

As John Maynard Keynes once famously quipped, “in the long run, many of us are dead”.

If we continue our current strategy most of us it's still alive. It's our economy that will be dead.