If we’re not willing to remain sheltered in place indefinitely, and if we’re not willing to lose up to a million lives to the coronavirus, the alternative is massive testing followed by contact tracing. Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Paul Romer of NYU claims to have done the math to determine how much testing we must do to bring the virus under control and keep it there. He is interviewed by Dr. Aaron Carroll for his weekly podcast, Healthcare Triage.

In the interview, they refer to R₀ (“R zero”), which refers to the rate of transmission of the disease. If R₀ equals 1, each person with the virus infects exactly one other person. If R₀ is greater than 1, the disease spreads exponentially. If R₀ is less than 1, the disease eventually dies out. Romer believes he has determined how much testing we need to do to keep R₀ below 1.

You may have noticed that in my last post, I referred to the possibility of losing up to 2 million lives in order to achieve herd immunity.  This was assuming a mortality rate of 1%.  Romer assumes a mortality rate of .5%; hence he arrives at a figure of 1 million deaths.  Of course, the true mortality rate is unknown.

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“There’ll Be More Death”