How the NBA can show us how to fight the virus

A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine, used to test covid19 samples.
A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine, used to test covid19 samples.

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The government must widen the net, open the spigots and release relief funds, abuse be damned, lest businesses be shuttered and lives shattered.

In the last week alone I’ve spoken to several small businesspeople and restaurateurs, talented people who’ve built up their businesses from scratch. Their cash reserves are finished and many will not emerge from the resurgence. Lockdown or no, far fewer customers will venture out with community spread.

Whatever economic firepower has been deployed, we need more.

Yes, we can’t afford to do this forever, but we can certainly afford another couple of months.

Even that would be just be a stopgap. What then?

Bill Gates expects a vaccine to be rolled out in rich countries by the end of next year, and in developing countries (ie us) by the end of 2022. So how do we survive two and a half more years in a cycle of viral suppressions, lockdowns, and resurgences?

As we look to life beyond next month, we could do worse than look to the surprising lessons of professional sports.

It is no coincidence that the most recently approved rapid test was partially funded by the NBA. Sports has some of the most to lose of any industry from covid19. That makes its model the more compelling: the sports “bubbles” that have been set up, from the Premier League to the IPL to the NBA, are an extreme but salutary model of what life may look like for certain industries. And at their foundation is constant, rapid testing.

That is the only way forward if we are not to lose a generation of children from lost schooling, a generation of businesses and entrepreneurs from cashflow crunches, and worse still, a generation of our most vulnerable, elderly and sick, all in rapid succession.

That is why the government must prepare for mass purchases of rapid covid19 test kits. And by rapid testing I do not mean the current accurate, slow, and expensive PCR tests currently in use. It made sense for CARPHA and the government to place a premium on accuracy when cases could be contained. But we are swiftly moving past that stage.

We must move to the new types of rapid tests like the most recent test approved last week by the FDA. Developed by Yale, these cost as little as US$10. Crucially, they don’t take days to return results.

Rapid testing and pooled testing (where lots of tests are run in a machine at once) is the only way that we can ramp up mass testing and avoid more lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine.

Forget about the cost, any cost of mass testing is insignificant compared to the economic costs of even a partial lockdown, and businesses would be happy to eat some of the costs if it meant staying open. There is universal consensus amongst economists that any potential costs of even hundreds of thousands of tests will be more than offset by the cost savings of staying open and permitting people to continue living.

The main objection to rapid testing so far from some in the healthcare world is the prevalence of false negatives. But massive levels of testing outweigh the impact of false negatives in the fight against infection.

As Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer has shown, more testing reduces spread even if the margin of error of tests is significantly higher. A big part of that is the speed of rapid tests; we need to get a result and decide to quarantine people or not within one day as opposed to three or four days after a suspect already has happily gone about their business, infecting others.

Meeting the virus head-on could even open up economic opportunity. India’s Serum Institute and Mexico’s Slim Foundation are already ramping up manufacturing capacity for a vaccine. Is it so far-fetched that we could do the same for our region? At the very least there’s no reason why some enterprising businesspeople, together with the government, can’t approach developers of newly approved tests and offer to manufacture those right here. The worst they can say is no.

I do remain hopeful that we will arrest the spread of the virus in the next few weeks. But even if we do so, the sad reality is that the pandemic is highly likely to re-emerge. When it does, we should not meet it trapped, going mad in our houses as we wait for retrenchment letters. Instead we must be ready to greet covid19 as a worthy adversary, safe in the knowledge that our lives have been re-tooled; and supported by the systemic knowledge and action of mass testing.

Kiran Mathur Mohammed is a social entrepreneur, economist and businessman. He is a former banker, and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh

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"How the NBA can show us how to fight the virus"

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