CAMBRIDGE, April 11 (WNM) - A recent Harvard-study suggest that, depending on what tracing technology is used in conjunction with testing, at least millions and possibly hundreds of millions of tests per day will be needed to ride out the pandemic.

There is growing consensus from leading U.S. think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) that the way out of lockdown is through a massive testing and tracing infrastructure.

Yet there is much less clarity on how large this infrastructure must be to allow a safe return to work. Both the AEI and CAP proposals suggest that hundreds of thousands of tests per day might suffice. However, to date, we are not aware of epidemiological models that attempt to estimate the scale of required testing.

In the white paper is "Why We Must Test Millions a Day," Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (https://ethics.harvard.edu/test-millions) try to fill this gap with rough and preliminary but easily explicable calculations.

These suggest that, depending on what tracing technology is used in conjunction with testing, at least millions and possibly hundreds of millions of tests per day will be needed. While the authors estimate that such capacity is possible by late spring or early summer, they believe that the AEI and CAP timetables and cost estimates are unrealistic and that we must invest much more aggressively if we are to allow a return to work.

Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl conclude:

"For somewhere in the ballpark of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, combined with an intelligent used of tracing, we can end a lockdown that is costing the US economy tens of billions of dollars every day. If we instead target the much smaller number of tests suggested in the AEI and CAP analyses, we cannot safely leave lockdown. Failing to make this investment would go down as one of the most extreme examples in history of being pennywise and pound foolish. A key impediment to scaling up the supply chain is the lack of demand and supply perceived at every step of the testing supply chain. Achieving common acceptance of the need for tens of millions of tests a day and coordinating efforts to hit this target is therefore critical to our ability to go outside again. We must communicate this message as clearly and as loudly as we can to as many leaders as possible, and as quickly as possible."