The Right Way to Reopen

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- With more than 60,000 Americans dead, 25 million out of a job, and the economy nearing outright collapse thanks to the coronavirus, it's understandable that governors nationwide are itching to lift lockdown restrictions and get everyone back to work. Regrettably, doing so is still premature.

Although any reopening will rightly unfold in phases, three essential steps are needed before anything like normal economic activity can resume. All three require the kind of federal leadership that has so far been absent.

The most important step is to ramp up coronavirus testing. Without adequate screening, it's impossible to know who's been infected, who's vulnerable and how widely the virus has spread. Until such data can be reliably collected, it won't be possible to replace lockdowns with a reliable containment strategy, in which those who contract the virus — and their close contacts — can be quarantined.

Screening everyone with Covid-19 symptoms or exposure will require a substantial increase in testing capacity, widespread use of rapid diagnostics and intricate coordination. By one estimate, the U.S. would need to administer some 5 million tests a day to safely resume social activities, compared with a current capacity of about 300,000 a day. A national strategy is essential for a project of that scale.

Unfortunately, the White House has abdicated this responsibility. Its plan to boost testing, released Monday, leaves all the hard work to the states and insists the federal government is merely the “supplier of last resort.” A serious national testing strategy should instead prod laboratories to create better and faster screening, offer companies the financial and logistical support they need to produce more test kits, monitor cases to ensure that tests are distributed where they're most needed, and make sure all 50 states are screening adequately and reporting their results.

A second challenge is equipment. Across the country, doctors and nurses still report a shortage of basic protective gear, such as masks and gowns. States can't keep testing programs going without predictable supplies of materials like swabs and reagents. Getting the public to adhere to federal guidelines on face shielding would be a lot easier if more — and better — protective masks were easily available.

Such shortages are solvable, but they demand a fundamental rethink from the White House. So far, the Trump administration has been erratically invoking the Defense Production Act to harangue individual companies and labs into making the stuff it deems most important, with little attention to their capacity or competence for the job. This hasn't worked. It's exactly the wrong approach.

The government should instead offer purchase guarantees for essential equipment and promise to pay above-market rates (at least to start) to any company that can make the needed goods quickly and safely, while absorbing excess production into federal stockpiles. This would reduce uncertainty about future demand and incentivize companies to make the longer-term investments — such as retraining staff and retooling factories — needed to ramp up production. If designed as an auction, with higher prices for faster work, this approach would also encourage innovation, increase efficiency and significantly speed things up.

A final prerequisite is to develop a large-scale plan to trace the contacts of those who've been infected and encourage them to get tested and isolate themselves. This is hard enough for run-of-the-mill infectious diseases. A global pandemic poses immense challenges. For one thing, there are only some 2,200 professional contact tracers in the U.S.; experts estimate that 100,000 may be needed to fight the coronavirus.

If the Trump administration has a plan for expanding this capacity it has kept uncharacteristically quiet about it. As a start, the Department of Health and Human Services should stipulate how the government intends to help states hire and train tracers on a large scale, work with technology companies to coordinate this process nationally, and encourage widespread adoption of tracing apps — which, with privacy protections, should help inform policy makers, hasten the recovery and save lives. (Disclosure: Bloomberg Philanthropies is helping fund a tracing program in New York.) A prudent liability-protection plan for businesses will also be imperative.

Getting the economy back to “normal” is likely to be a long and painful process. But these initial efforts would help health authorities get a grip on the pandemic and lay the groundwork for more ambitious steps to come. All of it should've been done already. It isn't too late, even now, for the administration to show some leadership.

Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.