(bright music)
(air whooshing)
[Nick Tucker] Hey, everyone, welcome back
to Freethink's "Progress Report".
I'm Nick and I've got some news
about what's moving forward in the world.
Every month, it seems like the COVID pangolin
emerges from its burrow
only to see its shadow and declare
another six weeks of quarantine.
But things are starting to change
and people are beginning to make plans
about how to get back to normal.
What'll it take for you to feel like
you can go back to your normal routine?
We spoke with Dr. Paul Romer,
the Nobel Prize winning economist
who thinks that the key is testing,
lots and lots of testing.
(air whooshing)
[Nick Tucker] So for people who aren't familiar with your work,
I wonder if you could just introduce yourself.
[Paul Romer] My name's Paul Romer,
I'm an economist at New York University.
[Nick Tucker] And you recently published this roadmap
to reopening America responsibly.
I'm curious, how do you compare yours
to other plans or proposals?
And what sets yours apart?
[Paul Romer] I published a roadmap that had a single focus
on expanding tests and using the strategy
of test and isolate to make it safe
for people to go back to work.
We need to get up to 20 to 30 million tests a day.
So how do you get to a scale like that?
You just start working one step at a time.
You roll out new laboratories,
you find new ways to do the tests.
And you use those tests first
on people like doctors and nurses,
EMTs, who are already exposed.
And part of how we're gonna make this
more widely available, is to shift to things
like a saliva sample instead of using a swab.
There's already an approved process for using saliva,
so you just spit in the little tube,
send it off and get it tested.
So we need the sampling method,
we need the labs to process those samples,
and then we need ways to get people
to start using these sampling methods and sending them in.
All of those things could be scaled up very dramatically.
[Nick Tucker] What do you think are the key obstacles
that we're facing right now in terms
of producing that volume of tests?
[Paul Romer] Well, the first obstacle is that
it's against the law to produce a test,
unless you get permission from the FDA.
We've painted ourselves into a terrible corner here,
and we know there are people in universities
that've said thinks like, "Ah, you don't need to use swabs,
"you can just use saliva. Here, we showed it."
Or, "you know, those reagents that are out of supply?
Turns out there's some other reagents you can use.
You don't have approval to do it
but it would work if you did."
So people on university campuses
have figured all of this out,
why don't we just let them do that?
[Nick Tucker] Obviously the key feature is testing.
And one of the things that occurs to me as I read that
is how realistic is it for people
to expect that they would be tested that reasonably?
For example, a lot of people don't even...
[Paul Romer] I've decided, I've gone to this conversation
so many times, I'm just not even gonna start there
on, "Oh, we don't think we do it."
We produce 350 million cans worth of soda every day,
because the value of soda, which I don't drink,
but the value to some people is worth more
than the cost of producing the soda,
so the economy produces them.
The tests would be worth an enormous amount right now,
so we just gotta make it possible
for the economy to produce them, end of story.
[Nick Tucker] Are there parallels?
I mean, the last pandemic that I think
most people have recollection of is AIDS,
and I'm curious, are there lessons to be learned
from how the HIV epidemic was handled or not handled
in terms of how we do handle this one?
[Paul Romer] Well, there was a program called Test and Treat
for dealing with the spread of HIV,
which involved getting people to go get tested
and then, if you got tested,
to get treated with these antiretrovirals.
This was ultimately relatively successful way
to control the spread of the virus.
Fortunately, with this new coronavirus,
it's much easier to manage,
you just have to go into isolation
for a relatively short period of time.
If there's some antiretrovirals that will treat it too,
well so much the better.
The only other problem is we have to recognize
that this thing can spread very widely.
So you need to be ready to test a lot more people.
It's not just a small community
that are candidates for being tested,
it's pretty much everybody is a candidate
for being tested and then isolated
if they happen to carry it.
(air whooshing)
[Nick Tucker] It might seem unbelievable right now
that we'll be getting tested twice a month for COVID-19.
But then again, on September 10, 2001,
no one would've believed that we'd all be
taking off our shoes just to get onto an airplane.
Things change and we tend
to get used to them pretty quickly.
So what are the biggest changes you anticipate
as we start to put together
something closer to our normal lives?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for checking in with us.
We'll see you soon.
Make sure you get tested if you can, for everything.
Too much?
Too much.