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by scott_s 2244 days ago
Paul Romer, an economist at NYU, has been advocating for testing millions of people a day for a few weeks. He is co-author of a piece in The Atlantic, "Without More Tests, America Can’t Reopen", https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/were-testi...

Googling for "romer covid 19" should turn up a lot of news sources covering the notion of testing millions of people a day.

2 comments

Yes, he is the best I've found. This proposal is still at least an order of magnitude more testing though :) (on the order of 100 million tests/day, not 1 million tests/day)
Romer has called for as much as 30 million tests a day, which I think was based on some simplistic modeling. I think he was targeting everyone in the US being tested every two weeks. I think the two approaches are similar: let's test lots of people all the time, however many X million tests a day that is, so that we can quickly isolate and treat them. People are spreading it before they know they have it, so let's just test everyone all the time and not wait until they have symptoms.
Basically like the porn industry.
This is a really good analogy actually. The porn industry has higher risk for STDs but lower incidence than the general population.
Paul Romer is also a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.