COVID-19 Control and the Economy : Test, Test, Test

Hard lockdowns have left policymakers to face the ethical dilemma of choosing between saving lives and saving the economy. However, massive testing could have helped to respond more effectively to COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we study the trade-off between infection control, lockdown and testing. An extended SIR epidemic model is developed to identify the set of testing and lockdown levels that lead to a reproduction number below one, thus to infection control and saving lives. It depends on whether the testing policy is static or dynamic, the model suggests that testing 4% to 7% of the population daily is the way to safely reopen the economy and the society