To defeat COVID-19 and get our country back on the road to recovery, we need to follow through on what public health professionals have been saying all along: Get cases extremely low, and then keep them that way through an aggressive testing, tracing and isolation protocol. Given the wholly inadequate federal response to date, this means we need our governors to dramatically ramp up testing and contact tracing. In most states that means doing 5 or even 10 times as much testing as is being done now.
States need to commit to hitting the targets that the experts at the Brown School of Public Health and the Harvard Global Health Institute say we need to achieve to suppress the virus. And test results need to be available within 48 hours, so we can trace infections back to their source and contain outbreaks before they happen. The federal government certainly should do what it can to provide the resources and coordination to make this possible. But we can’t afford to wait for Washington — we need our state leaders to take action now.
Our testing infrastructure should also include a workforce of contact tracers large enough to trace all current cases. Experts say we need at least 100,000 more contact tracers, but the number keeps going up as infections rise. Most states are far short of the number of contact tracers they need.
In addition, we need more personal protective equipment (PPE). Many people — medical workers, professional caregivers, grocery clerks and others — do work that is essential, and we need to keep them safe. PPE is one of the most effective tools to slow the spread of COVID-19, and right now we have nowhere near enough of it.