America is on hold. The coronavirus has spread to every corner of our country, and even those who have not been directly affected have seen every aspect of their lives upended.
The health risks of this virus are real, and the social distancing and self-isolation of those exposed are necessary to slow the spread. But putting America on hold is having its own dire consequences.
It has sent our economy into free fall, taking away people’s livelihoods and savings and putting enormous strain on the social safety net. In the midst of the chaos, it’s right to ask: How do we balance both taking the virus seriously and getting back to school, back to work, and back to our normal daily lives? And how soon can that happen?
The answers depend on a more effective healthcare response and establishing a credible way to measure the problem. The recently passed $2 trillion CARES Act will help families and businesses weather this storm, but no amount of taxpayer money will be sufficient to reverse the economic fallout until we begin to reverse the spread of COVID-19.
Parents won’t let their children go back to school, customers won’t fill restaurants again, travelers won’t get back on airplanes, and many businesses won’t bring their employees back until they believe it’s safe.
Using the unprecedented additional public health funding Congress has just provided, we must target the shortfalls in our system, especially testing, and develop a credible system of metrics to measure success. Only then can we return to normalcy.
The metric that most other countries have used is the number of new coronavirus cases confirmed each day. This makes sense, but with such a large and diverse country with different areas feeling the effects of the coronavirus in very different ways, our data should be presented on a regional basis. Because COVID-19 is a “reportable disease,” this information from local and state departments of health is already supposed to be reported every time a new case is confirmed.
However, this data is often not reported in a usable manner because of variations in state software systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes a daily report on its website, but the information cannot be broken down by a state or regional basis. Improvements are underway, and the new federal resources will help.
Our goal should be for CDC leadership to present national and regional data every day in a public manner, with both a comparison to the previous day as well as a broader trend line. This will be the metric.
Ultimately, when we start to see the number of new cases decline, it will give people greater confidence that we can begin to reopen the economy region by region. We must continue to practice this system of monitoring and responding at the federal level until every region of the United States is virus-free.
On the policy side, Congress is helping by providing unprecedented resources to our healthcare professionals on the front lines to respond to this evolving threat. This will help ramp up the procurement of personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns so they can safely treat patients. It will help speed up the development of potentially life-saving antiviral therapies that will help alleviate the symptoms of the coronavirus. Reopening our country will be more successful if people feel they have access to an effective therapy to lessen the severity of the disease if they become infected.
And most importantly, these resources will help develop faster, more reliable, and universally accessible tests. Accurate metrics on new cases require having more available testing, including for those who are asymptomatic. This will help us better identify those who are currently at risk of infecting others.
Countries such as South Korea and Japan have shown that widespread testing, including of individuals who are not displaying symptoms, is key to mapping out and containing the virus before it spreads further. We are headed in the right direction: This week, LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics announced that they will be able to process 300,000 tests per week, which is almost equal to the number of total confirmed cases in the world.
As for reopening our economy, it is imperative that these decisions be based on sound science. The president’s world-class medical team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and others, are committed to starving the virus of human transmission and protecting public health.
President Trump made the right call and saved lives by limiting travel from China early on. He would be right again to embrace sound science and reopen the economy based on consultations with his medical team, which is committed to preventing the unnecessary loss of human life.
The president’s goal of opening parts of the economy by Easter, an aspirational goal we all share, must be based on sound science. A rushed return to normalcy would create a spike in the spread of the virus and overwhelm our healthcare system.
We are confident that once we get this virus under control, we will see an unprecedented economic rebound powered by the strong fundamentals of our economy, providing untold relief to millions of families feeling the pain of the current economic collapse. But that will only happen if we take the proactive steps to equip our healthcare system to better respond to the coronavirus and establish a robust and credible tracking system to monitor and publicly announce the daily number of new cases.
Let’s work together to beat this virus and restore the world’s greatest economy as soon as possible.
Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican, is the junior senator from Ohio. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, is the senior senator from South Carolina.
