Paul Romer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let’s say we make you testing czar, and the Romer regime is put into place. Over the first month, what percentage of Americans do you think would show up to be tested? Well, I would try and do a calculation about where might tests be most valuable. And if the states are the ones who are buying tests and providing them, encourage states to use them for those high-value purposes. I think frequent testing in nursing homes might be all it would take to cut the death rate in half right now. The estimates are that as many as half of the deaths are actually taking place in nursing homes. And it seems to me that there’s no hope for contact tracing there. There’s talk about rebuilding all of the nursing homes. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. But if you tested everybody, initially every day so you know exactly who’s infectious inside a nursing home — test all of the staff; test all of the visitors — then we should be able to isolate the few who are infectious and really bring down the deaths in nursing homes. So I’d use those, there, first. Second, I think it would be great to get Major League Baseball started again. I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day, and let them start playing games in empty stadiums, because you need a lot more tests to test the fans, to have them come in. But we could be playing baseball in empty stadiums without any risks that we’re increasing this R factor, and people enjoy baseball. It would be an important signal of how we go back to work in this regime. I think that could be an important complement to nursing homes. To keep going — There’s a study out. I think it came out May 10th or May 11th, and they did test everyone in Major League Baseball — a lot of the staff, not just the players. And hardly any of them are COVID positive. We tested so many of the NBA players. But given those sports are still not reopening, doesn’t that mean testing isn’t enough?…

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