A: Hey great job! All the hard work we have done to cooperate on social distancing really is working!
In many areas the new case counts are starting to flatten or even fall. So you might be wondering–now what? Can we all go back to normal?
Short answer: several things need to fall into place before we can go back to normal. Those things are testing, more testing, and a major scale-up in contact tracing and safe quarantine options for those who test positive.
Long answer:
First, be careful how you think about the “peak.” The peak means we are at the maximum of active infections circulating (or hospitalizations, or deaths, depending on what your model is using as an outcome). If a peak is a mountain, we still need to get pretty far down the other side before we can consider relaxing restrictions.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health–an international leader in infectious disease control–has put forth a science-driven national plan detailing how to enter the next phase of the pandemic in the United States. This phase we can call outbreak management. The upshot is that to perform effective outbreak management (and get back to our lives), we need:
1. Access to rapid diagnostic tests for all symptomatic cases or those with a reasonable suspicion of COVID-19 exposure.
2. Widespread serological testing to understand underlying rates of infection
3. the ability to trace all contacts of reported cases, safely isolate those who are infected and quarantine those who are exposed.
Furthermore, JHU scholars note that “our public health workforce needs to add approximately 100,000 (paid or volunteer) contact tracers to assist with this large-scale effort.” and “Congress will need to appropriate approximately $3.6 billion in emergency funding to state and territorial health departments.”
Ultimately lifting the stay at home orders are a policy decision, which we sincerely hope will be informed by science.
