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School openings will need to be monitored. Scientists should adjust the rules if necessary. Children who must stay at home should be contacted directly by the school. Teachers will need support. Those most vulnerable to infection, such as diabetics, should be able to teach remotely. The rest will need guidance on hygiene and social distancing. They should be tested regularly for covid-19.
No proven pharmaceutical agents specific to the treatment or prevention of Covid-19 currently exist. For now, we must rely on nonpharmaceutical interventions — social distancing, hygiene, and closings of schools and businesses — to mitigate the spread of the virus. For severely ill patients, the best we can do at the moment is supportive care, from intravenous fluids, oxygen, and ventilators to dialysis and blood-pressure-support medicine.
3. What Other Coronaviruses Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2
4. The Coronavirus Will Create a New Kind of Tourist
Adapting this process to Covid-19, it’s important to identify asymptomatic or mild cases as well as severe cases because these cases can transmit the virus, too. In addition, we need to apply the CDC’s definition of a “close contact” to Covid-19. Being within six feet of someone for a prolonged period; or caring for, visiting, or living with a Covid-19 infected person, qualifies as close contact. South Korea worked from this definition, and it has been credited with reducing the proliferation of cases there. South Korea’s success so far, Science reports, owes to “the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts.”
6. A Strategy for Reopening New York City’s Economy
An exit strategy should involve two components. The first is a series of measures to mitigate the risks of infection as much as possible. The second is a staged approach to opening to help protect vulnerable populations.
7. A Plan for Ending New York’s Shutdown (podcast)
Now, another tactic to address this asymptomatic carrier situation is the use of masks. That’s something that New York I think is already moving quite in the direction of many other States have as well and I think it will have to be part of our response going forward. Masks are really valuable for a lot of reasons in this disease in particular masks are actually quite important to ensure that those asymptomatic carriers aren’t actually spreading the disease to other people even if they don’t know themselves that they are infected. That is kind of intended to address these asymptomatic carriers. There are some symptoms that I think we can try to address. So the temperature checks is an idea that again, other States, Ohio in particular have tried out in which you might test the workplace and see if anyone has a fever and ensure that those individuals or are sent back home and another measure that you brought up is this issue of centralized quarantine zones.
Now, this is I think is a really critical measure that has been adopted a lot in some of these Asian countries but has not yet seen a widespread use in the United States. The a number of States are experimenting with this and the basic idea is that if you have someone who has tested positive, we need to find ways of ensuring that they don’t spread this disease further to individuals they actually live with and having a place-
8. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?
9. Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert
COWEN: If we look at Singapore, which has done a lot with testing and track and trace, it seems, at least superficially, they did many things right. Now they’re back to having over 900 cases a day [subsequently more], and they’re about the size of Fairfax County and have incredible governance. What did Singapore do wrong, and how will we avoid that same mistake?
WEYL: The truth is I haven’t followed the Singaporean case recently closely enough to figure out what went wrong recently. My impression is that they put too much confidence into a particular digital tracing system, which turned out to get very low take-up, and they pulled back on their manual tracing efforts before there was reason to be confident that they had the ability to pull back on them.
There’s also a big problem, which is that manual tracing efforts do a poor job of covering public spaces, and I think that the Singaporeans believed that these Bluetooth-based tracing technologies would cover those public spaces well, and they failed to do so. And they therefore allowed redensification of their public spaces too quickly, and I think that’s something we need to be very careful about.
10. How to Implement Policies with Impact? A Policymakers’ Toolkit
11. Episode 1: The Value of A Life — Pandemic Economics Podcast
12. Macroeconomics during the great lockdown: a discussion of recent coronavirus research
13. Big Data for the Public Good
14. The underpinnings of Sweden’s permissive COVID regime
15. You Don’t Have to Emerge From Quarantine a Beautiful Butterfly
Let yourself get into video games. After rejecting video games for a quarter-century, I became a big-time gamer last year, thanks to my boyfriend, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Like many others stuck at home, I’ve gotten deep into Animal Crossing: New Horizons — a game where you build a society on an island full of cute animals. It’s fun for the whole family (if you have kids) or a coterie of grown-up roommates. If you too have heard the hype, believe it: Teeter-tottering around an idyllic, underpopulated, animated island, you might momentarily forget about the gloom happening outside your windows.
16. The Man Who Thought Too Fast
Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier. That exercise has become more entertaining with the publication of the first full biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers” (Oxford), by Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. Drawing on family papers and records of interviews conducted four decades ago for a biography that was never written, Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended.
17. Fed Chair to Congress: Do Whatever It Takes to Keep the Economy From Collapse