How to Determine If It's Safe to Go Back to Business As Usual
by John Lawrence, April10, 2020
Governor Cuomo implied that we need more antibody testing, and that would tell us when it's safe to go back to business as usual. I disagree. We need more testing for the coronavirus itself in the general population because no matter how many people have antibodies, there will still be a large number of people without them, and, as long as there are still asymptomatic carriers out there, all those people without antibodies can still get sick. If you test randomly for the coronavirus in a particular hotspot, only a certain number of people need to be tested - not the entire population - before you can say that statistically your chances of contracting the coronavirus are less than a certain percentage. Obviously, you need more tests to know that your chances are less than 0.1% than you do to know that your chances are less than 1%. Assuming that there are still some carriers out there, only testing the general population randomly will tell you how many positive tests there are per, for example, 1000 total tests. Statistically, with testing on a random basis a ratio of positive tests to total tests can be arrived at. You would still isolate the ones that tested positive until the quarantine period was up and they then tested negative. Also you would continue to test those with symptoms and isolate those that tested positive as well.
For the same number of tests, different hot spots would yield different results so that you would know that certain areas were safer to resume business as usual than others. It would still be necessary to restrict travel among the different areas so that the virus would not be reintroduced from an area where the chances were high to contract it to an area where the chances were relatively low. Therefore, all persons entering the country from abroad would need to be tested as well as all persons entering a region where the infection rates are low from a region where the infection rates are high. That means that the country would need to get back to business in a "phased in" way rather than in a "flipping a light switch" way.
As Governor Cuomo pointed out, the history of the 1918 flu pandemic was that there was an initial peak followed by an even bigger peak some time later followed by a third peak some time after that. The whole situation lasted some 10 months. This is the situation you want to avoid with this pandemic. If social distancing restrictions are lifted too soon before adequate testing has taken place, the virus could be reintroduced and take off again among those without antibodies which will be the vast majority of the population. That's why business cannot go back to normal in every part of the country simultaneously. It has to be a phased in approach in which areas where people live who have tested statistically low enough can cautiously get back to work, but the areas where testing shows that the infection rate is still too high must continue to socially distance and not return to business as normal.
