The Pandemic Information Gap by Joshua Gans

Author:Joshua Gans [Gans, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

A Tale of Two Regions

Some countries moved to a testing economy very early in the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, Taiwan started testing travelers from Wuhan for symptoms on December 31, 2019, and soon after integrated travel histories with national data sets and made them available to hospitals.36 But Taiwan has special characteristics that make its response somewhat atypical (e.g., Taiwan is an island with a tight relationship with China). More instructive in terms of seeing what a testing economy can achieve is to compare the Lombardy and Veneto regions of Italy.

Both regions applied social distancing and locked down retail areas. But only Veneto put in place a testing regime: testing both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases, testing contacts if someone tested positive, having testing carried out in homes, and implementing general measures to protect healthcare professionals.37 The result was that, as of March 26, Veneto (with a population of 5 million) had 7,000 cases and 287 deaths, while Lombardy (with a population of 10 million) had five times the number of cases and 5,000 deaths.

The testing economy is what emerges when you have the virus under control, but you do not have widespread immunity either via past infections or from a vaccine. This means that tests, like post-9/11 security measures, will likely be a part of our daily lives for many years to come lest we end up more like Lombardy than Veneto.

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