An ethical plan for ending the pandemic and restarting the economy Danielle Allen
Transcriber: Ivana Korom
Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz
Corey Hajim: Hi, Chris, how are you?
Chris Anderson: I’m very well, Corey,
it’s absolutely lovely to see you.
CH: It’s great to see you, too.
(Laughter)
CA: Somehow, you’re always smiling,
no matter how dangerous, weird,
crazy things are.
Thank you for that.
CH: You don’t see me
in the other room crying afterwards,
but we’ll leave that
for the other [unclear].
So Chris, this is week three
of these conversations,
how are you thinking about the people
we should be speaking with?
CA: I mean, there are so many
aspects to this, right?
There’s understanding
the basic pandemic itself
and all the science around that.
There’s the psychology
that we’re all going through, the mindset.
And we’ve had speakers
addressing both of these.
And then I think increasingly,
the conversation
is going to be “what now?”
“How do we dig ourselves out of this?
What’s the way forward?”
And there’s a couple of speakers
this week focused on that.
And I think it’s –
These conversations are incredibly rich,
because I think one of the things
that people have got growing consensus on
is that step one, we kind of get, right?
You shut things down,
physically distance
in whatever way you can,
different countries have gone about it
slightly differently,
but basically that “flattens the curve,”
ultimately,
the number of cases,
the number of infections slows down.
And, but then what?
Because you can’t go
back to life as normal,
when you’re living at home completely.
You could do some things, but you can’t.
And so that’s what
we’re going to talk about today.
CH: Right, it feels really hopeful
to talk about some actions we can take
besides just staying away
from everybody else.
So, well, I guess I’ll pass it over to you
to introduce the speaker,
and I will come back a little bit later
to share some questions from our audience.
CA: Thanks so much, Corey,
see you again in a bit.
CH: Thank you.
CA: And yes, if you know anyone out there
who has just got stuck on,
“But how do people get back to work?”
“Where do we go from here?”
Those are the people who you should,
maybe invite them
into this conversation right now,
because I think they’re going to be
really interested.
Our speaker, our guest
is a professor at Harvard, Danielle Allen.
She runs, among other things,
she runs an institute for ethics there,
the Safra institute.
And fundamentally, she’s thinking
about the ethical questions
about what’s happening here,
but she has pulled together
an extraordinary multidisciplinary team
of economists, business leaders and others
who have put together a plan,
and I’ve been obsessed
with this whole thing
and how we find our way out.
This plan is as compelling a plan
as I’ve seen anywhere.
So let’s dig into it without further ado,
Danielle Allen, welcome here
to TED Connects.
Danielle Allen: Thank you, Chris,
happy to be here.
I’m really, really grateful
to have the chance
to have this conversation with you.
CA: It’s – It’s so good,
I just enjoyed our conversation
over the last couple of days.
This is such a complex problem.
What I kind of want you to do
is just go through it step-by-step,
to see the logic
of what it is that your team
are putting forward.
First of all –
Just the problem itself
of how we get the economy going again,
just talk a bit
about what’s at stake there,
because sometimes this is framed as
“The economy? Who cares about the economy?
People’s lives are at stake.
So let’s just focus on that,
don’t worry about the economy.”
But it’s not as simple as that.
I mean, as an ethicist,
what’s at stake if we don’t restart
the economy somehow?
DA: Well we have to recognize
that we’ve actually faced
two existential threats simultaneously.
The first was to the public health system.
If the virus had been allowed
to unfold unimpeded,
our public health systems
would have collapsed
and that would have produced
a whole legitimacy crisis
for our public institutions.
So of course we shut down,
we had to do that,
it was a necessary self-defense action
that has, however,
really devastated the economy.
And that is also an existential threat,
we can’t actually endure a closed economy
over a duration of 12 to 18 months.
Nor can we really endure a situation
where we don’t know whether we might have
another two to three months
of extensive social distancing.
So we really need an integrated strategy,
one that recognizes
both of these existential threats
and finds a way to control the disease
at the same that we can keep
the economy open.
We call that combination
of controlling the disease
while keeping the economy open
pandemic resilience.
We think that’s what
we should be aiming for.
CA: So people who aren’t moved
by the notion of the economy,
capitalism, whatever,
think instead about the millions
and millions of jobs that were lost,
the people who are desperate
to make money.
And I guess the lives that will be lost
unless we solve this problem.
DA: Absolutely, the economy
is one of the foundational pillars
for a healthy society
with opportunity and with justice.
You can’t have a just society either,
if you haven’t secured
a just and functioning economy
that delivers well-being for people.
So all we have to do
is remember back to 2008,
and think about the impacts
on things like suicide and depression
and so forth, that flowed
from that recession,
so the economy is a public health concern
in the same way that the virus
is a public health concern.
CA: OK, so talk about why
this is such an intractable problem.
People isolate,
in many countries in the world now
you’re starting to see the cases flatten
and in many cases decrease.
It looks like,
whether it’s happened now
in your country or not,
that will happen sooner or later.
So why isn’t that problem solved,
we’ve beaten the virus,
let’s get back to work?
DA: That’s a great question
and it really speaks to how new
the experience for us is
to encounter a novel virus.
It just really hasn’t happened
to our society in a very, very long time.
So we are what’s called
the susceptible population,
meaning not any of us
at the beginning of this had immunity.
We were all susceptible
to catching the disease.
For a society to be safe,
it needs to have
what’s called herd immunity.
You could achieve that through vaccination
or through people getting the disease.
But it takes 50 to 67 percent
of the population to get the disease
in order to achieve
that level of protection.
We don’t expect a vaccine
anytime in the next 12 months,
possibly 18 months,
so we have to recognize
that that pathway is not open to us.
And to get a sense of the magnitude
of what it would mean to live through
the disease to get to herd immunity,
think about this:
In Italy right now
they estimate that about
15 percent of the population
has probably been exposed to the disease.
So you’d have to repeat
what Italy has done
three or more times,
to get to a place where
you can reasonably think
that there’s herd immunity.
And I think you can see
that when you think of that picture,
how destabilizing a process would be
of just leaving things broadly open
without disease controls.
So the real trick is whether or not
there’s a substitute for social distancing
as a method for controlling the disease.
CA: Right. So Italy,
even with that 15 percent
has suffered at least 15,000 deaths,
some people argue that it’s
underreported by 50 percent there,
it might be 30,000 deaths plus there,
and as they come down the curve,
there will be more to come.
Multiply that by five or six, say,
for the bigger population size of the US
and the herd immunity idea per se
doesn’t seem like a winning idea.
I mean, it’s a horrible idea.
DA: It’s a horrible idea, exactly.
And we do have alternatives,
that’s the important thing,
we actually do have a way
of controlling the disease,
minimizing loss of life
and reopening the economy,
so that’s the thing
we should all be focusing on.
CA: And again, the initial problem is that
if you just let people start coming back,
as soon as they gather again
in reasonable numbers,
the risk is that this
highly infectious bug
just takes off again.
DA: Exactly.
CA: And so one scenario is that you have
countries lurching from
a little bit of activity here
and then suddenly it explodes again
and everyone has to retreat.
That does not seem attractive,
that also just doesn’t work.
DA: No, exactly.
I mean, we described that
as a freeze in place strategy
for dealing with this.
That is you freeze
and you shut down all activity,
and then that flattens the curve,
you open up again,
then you have another peak,
you have to freeze again and so forth.
So you have this repeated
process of freezing,
which just does tremendous damage
to the economy over time.
I mean the upfront damage is huge,
but then there’s never space
to recover from it,
because of great deal of uncertainty
and repeated applications
of economically ruinous social distancing.
So I think you’re really
pointing to the features of the disease
that make this situation
a problem that it is.
And there are really two
that people should focus on.
One is the degree of infectiousness.
This is a highly infectious virus.
So the comparison to the Spanish flu
is a reasonable one
from the point of view
of degree of infectiousness.
Then the second really important
point about the disease
is that it’s possible
to be an asymptomatic carrier.
That is to be infectious,
to carry the virus,
and never show any symptoms yourself.
Current estimates are still imprecise,
but people think that about 20 percent
of virus carriers are asymptomatic.
And that is really the thing
that makes it so hard to control.
People don’t know they’re sick
and then they become disease vectors,
spreading it everywhere they go.
CA: Yes, indeed.
So talk a bit, Danielle,
about your thinking
about how we might outwit this thing.
DA: So the alternative
to social distancing
as a strategy for controlling the disease
is really massively ramped up,
massively scaled up testing,
combined with individual quarantine.
So we are going to continue
to need individual quarantine
for those who are positive
carriers of the virus,
until such a point
as we have gotten a vaccine.
Now what does that mean exactly?
It means that the standard quarantine
that aligns with the incubation period,
14 days is often what people talk about,
in the conservative picture
you might say twice
the incubation period length,
28 days for individual quarantine.
And we need that quarantine
for people who are symptomatic
and for asymptomatic
carriers of the virus.
Now the only way that you can actually
run an individual quarantine
as opposed to a collective
quarantine regime,
is if you do massive testing.
We really need to make testing
in a sense universally available,
so that we can be testing
broadly across the population.
There are ways to target test,
make it more efficient and so forth,
but in principle, what one should imagine,
is really wide-scale testing,
tens of millions of tests a day,
connected with quarantine
for those who test positive.
(Coughs) Excuse me.
CA: So weird.
Anytime anyone coughs today,
you go, “Oh, God, are you OK?”
DA: Yeah, no, no, I’m fine,
Frog in the throat, that’s all it is.
CA: (Laughs)
So just to play out a thought experiment.
If we had an infinite
number of tests available,
and after the curve has flattened
and cases have gone down,
everyone came back to work,
but everyone was tested every day.
Then what we think is
that the tests will show up positive
at the same time,
or possibly even ahead of the time
that people are infectious.
But certainly, let’s say at the same time,
regardless of whether they’re symptomatic.
And so you could –
Those people would
immediately go back home
and the rest of the population
should be OK,
we should be able to get work done,
in that thought experiment, right?
DA: Right, in that thought
experiment, exactly, yeah.
CA: But the trouble is,
that that would mean doing,
whatever, like, 200 million tests a day.
DA: Right, exactly.
CA: Which is many, many orders
of magnitude more than we have
and could even imagine ramping up to.
So you have a proposal,
and this is the ingenuity,
the proposal,
of how to potentially administer tests
in a way that’s much more efficient.
Talk a bit about that.
DA: Sure.
So if you were going to use
a purely random testing method
to control the disease,
you could probably actually get away
with testing everybody
every two or three days –
I’m playing along
with your thought experiment here –
and bring the number down
to 100 million tests a day.
But even that is a magnitude
that would take us
multiple months to get to,
let’s just say if we even wanted
to try to do something like that.
So the thing that you really need
is smart testing.
So rather than testing
the population at random,
what you do is you use testing
to identify people who are positive,
and then you add to that
contact tracing or contact warning,
we think about it in both ways.
And what this means is
that once you know who’s a positive test,
you figure out who else
has been exposed to that person
over the previous two weeks,
and they all get tested as well.
So you start to identify a class of people
who are a higher probability
of being infectious
and you test that group of people.
So you move away from random testing,
you target it through contact tracing
or contact warning.
And then, depending
on the level of effectiveness
of your contact-tracing
and contact-warning strategy,
you can reduce the numbers.
So on a moderately effective
contact-tracing regimen,
you could imagine doing
20 million tests a day.
On a highly effective regime
of contact tracing and warning,
you could get yourself down to the order
of five to 10 million tests a day.
CA: And some countries in Asia
seem to have pulled off
a version of this strategy
that has been effective.
But it requires one of two things,
if I understand you right, Danielle,
it requires either
just this massively scaled up,
or potentially quite intrusive
sort of manual contact tracing
where you have big teams
who swoop in to anyone
who’s tested positive
and try to unpack their complete
recent social history.
Or technology plays a role,
and this is where it gets complicated,
because you know, there are apps
in some of the Asian countries,
like, China has an app
which most people are,
I think, required to carry,
certainly in Wuhan and elsewhere,
where it’s very good at predicting
whether someone may need quarantine.
And they will be required to do so.
And so there are all these concerns
about government control,
government intrusion.
You are in discussion about ways
of doing some kind of technology
that would be more acceptable
in a democracy,
and I’d love you to share what those are.
DA: Sure, I’m happy to do that.
So I think it’s an important
thing to say upfront
that the rates at which
we would need to test per capita
are higher, much higher
than Asian countries used,
because prevalence is much higher here.
They caught it earlier,
they had these tools built
before the pandemic hit.
As a consequence,
they’re able to control it
with a lower per capita rate of testing
than will be the case for us.
We just have to accept
that fact at this point
and recognize that massively scaling up
is specific to our situation,
because we weren’t ready before it hit.
So then, yes, OK, if we’re trying
to do the smart testing,
trying to use tools, what can you do?
So we’re actually open to manual testing
in the plan that we’ve developed,
I want to just say that,
and I think that society,
we have a big choice to make,
whether what we want is a big core
of manual contact tracers
who are tracing people’s histories
and figuring out
who they’ve been in contact with
and who they’ve been exposed to.
Or if we want to try to use
a technological system.
The important thing
is there is a diversity of options
within the technology space.
So it’s really important to recognize
that places like Singapore and China
have used highly centralized
data systems for supporting this.
And so what happens is,
sort of, you carry your phone around,
and everybody is connected
to a central data system,
and then when somebody in the system
has a positive test,
that gets put into the app,
and then their phone
communicates to other phones
that it’s been in proximity with
over the previous two weeks,
to alert people that they too
need to get a test, OK?
That’s the basic concept.
In China and Singapore
the data structure for doing this
is highly centralized.
There are, however,
a lot of innovative apps
under development right now
that depend instead on a very
privacy-protective structure
where the data lives
on the individual user’s phone
and through a combination
of encryption and tokens
users of phones can communicate
with other users of phones,
but the data is not centralized.
So in that regard, it becomes
more of a peer-to-peer sharing,
sort of concept of friends warn friends
that they should probably go get tested.
Then you would have
a central repository of test data,
but the truth is, we already have that,
because all influenza tests for example,
already roll up into CDC
and Health and Human Services databases,
so that they can track
influenza patterns every year.
CA: So tell me if I understand this right.
You would carry on your phone an app
that would, when you got,
say, within six feet
of another human carrying that app,
the phones would exchange a Bluetooth –
using Bluetooth technology
they exchange a kind of token
that says, “Hi, we connected.”
But it’s encrypted.
And that is not communicated
to a central server,
that is on the phone.
But if either of you
in the next week or two tests positive,
your phone will be able
to communicate to all the people
which it exchanged token with,
to say, “Uh oh, someone who
you were close to in the last two weeks
has tested positive.
You’ve got to isolate.”
That’s basically how it works,
it’s done that way.
DA: Exactly.
CA: And then after, what,
three or four weeks,
the tokens can actually autodelete?
They go, they’re not there anymore.
DA: They expire, that’s right.
Because you only need the most
recent two weeks' information or data
about where you’ve been
and what other phones
your phone has interacted with.
So that’s the really key thing.
CA: Alright, we’ll come back
to that in a minute,
but let’s see what our friends
are asking online.
DA: OK.
CH: Hi, Danielle, hi, Chris.
Yeah, we’ve got a lot of great questions,
people are super interested
in how this is all going to work.
There’s a couple of questions
I’m trying to cobble together here.
I think people are really
interested in your thoughts
on the United States health care system.
We have so many underinsured
and uninsured people
and the changes that you might
make to that system,
I mean, does that situation
make things worse,
and what changes
would you make to the system
so that we’re not
as vulnerable in the future?
DA: So that’s a great set of questions,
and so just from the point of view
of the testing program,
it is absolutely critical
that the testing be free.
And so there is absolutely,
a sort of necessary feature of this,
which is about, kind of, universal access
element to the health system.
And so I’m sure there will be
tweaking that’s necessary
in the existing health system
to achieve that.
We’ve also without any question
seen vulnerabilities
that relate to and stem from
our fragmented health system.
So I think there’s a much bigger,
longer-term question to be had,
or conversation to have,
about how we overcome that fragmentation.
So yes, I do hope
this moment will be a spur
for that longer-term conversation
about improving our health system
and really achieving that universal
coverage that we so badly need.
CH: OK, thank you, I’ll see you
both again in a little bit.
CA: Thanks, Corey.
So let’s stay with this
tech issue for a bit.
And the sort of civil rights
or privacy questions
that it might still raise in some people.
So one concern is that
surely, if your phone is able
to contact these other phones,
someone somewhere
is ultimately going to reverse that
and we’ll have some kind
of record of your,
you know, everyone who
you’ve connected with,
and that might be concerning to some.
Is that a legitimate concern?
DA: I think it is, I mean, I think
we’ve been working hard on this question
and really trying to think it through
and when you talk to legal experts
and civil liberties experts and so forth,
everybody starts with the same premise:
assume failure.
Assume that you’ll have a data breach.
Think for that
and what kind of protection
you want in that regard.
And so when you think that way,
you of course are trying to minimize
any likelihood of that happening,
so hence the privacy-protective structure
of phones communicating with phones,
data living on the hardware of the phone,
not in the server, etc.
And then also you would want
a kind of democratic
accountability feature,
so for example having the Department
of Health and Human Services
have an auditing function
to audit whoever is manning the server
or controls the server
through which the tokens are exchanged
you would want to audit
their functionality
and how they’re using the data.
But then again, you presume failure,
that somebody’s reverse engineering,
the audit system fails in some fashion.
What’s your protection then?
The answer to that would appear to be
upfront legislation
that prohibits the commercialization
of this COVID testing data.
So that anybody who in any way
tried to commercialize it
in any kind of way,
would be subject to legal penalty.
So I think that’s how
you build the fence up upfront
in the expectation that somebody
would find the way to crack it.
CA: And then there’s a set of questions
around how you get this app
out there at scale,
because it’s only effective if,
say, two thirds of the people
who are working are carrying it, right,
something like that.
DA: Right.
CA: And so short of authoritarian
“everyone must have this app,”
I guess there are ways
that are interesting
to say to people, one,
this is a really useful app,
it will alert you quickly
if you’re at any risk.
But two,
to get to the kind of scale
we’re talking about,
you might have to say to people,
“Look, we’re slowly
going to come back to work,
industry by industry, company by company,
and the deal for you to come back
and break isolation,
the societal deal,
is that you have to be willing
to carry this app.”
And you could, for people
who didn’t want to do that,
I guess you could have some protection,
you can’t lose your job for that.
But, I mean, can you picture
society making the choice
that it is reasonable to require people
who want to come back to work
to carry that alert technology with them?
DA: So this is the hardest question.
We know we don’t want
an authoritarian model,
such as the one used
in China and Singapore,
so we have to figure out instead
how to activate that thing,
which is sort of the most important
democratic resource or asset,
namely solidarity.
So what is it that,
from a solidarity perspective,
it’s reasonable for us
to ask of each other?
That has to be the frame
for deciding how we approach this.
And so one aspect of this
is really, truly the building a culture
of opting in to this.
And there are examples of this.
So for example, New York
has tackled HIV testing
through a program that goes
by the label “New York Knows,”
and it started out with labels
of “Manhattan Knows” or “Brooklyn Knows,”
and so forth, of the different burrows.
And what this program is
is one that is owned
by community organizations,
community partners,
that do the job of spreading the word
and recruiting people
into testing programs.
And New York has the goal
of having every single New Yorker
be tested for HIV,
so in other words,
it’s established as an expectation,
that universal participation,
and it’s activated a network
of community partners and organizations,
to cultivate that commitment
to solidarity.
And so I think, in all honesty,
that that would be a really huge part
of what you would need to do
in order to tap into solidarity,
to have this work.
I’m sure that we would see some amount
of requiring in different context,
I think that’s a very hard one,
because you don’t want to generate
labor discrimination problems.
And so the model there,
to think about and to sort of figure out
what are our parameters,
what we think is fair,
connects to things
that schools currently do,
for example, when they require
that students show vaccination proof
before they can start the school year
and things like that.
So there are multiple states
that do that in schools for vaccines.
Would schools do the same thing,
what’s the sort of labor,
the workforce question like,
I think that very much remains
to be worked through,
but it’s a hugely important question.
CA: I’d be curious what
the watching audience thinks about this,
maybe you could enter a comment on it.
But I mean, is it reasonable,
in the world that we’re in right now,
for a company, let’s say, to say,
“Look, we want to get back to work,
but we want to do so and respect
the safety of all our workers.
That means that for you
to come back to work,
you need a test
showing that you’re negative.
And you need to carry this app
so that we alert people quickly
if there’s a problem.”
Is that –
“We won’t fire you if you don’t come in,
but if you want to come back to work,
that’s what you’ll have to agree to.”
Is that a reasonable chance?
I’m curious what people think.
Is there any other way to get –
Sorry.
DA: I mean, again,
there is precedent for this
in the sense that drug testing
works this way
in many employment contexts, right.
There are many roles where people
have to do routine drug tests
as a part of preserving their job.
That was a hotly
debated issue in the 1980s,
people sort of think back
when that sort of first came in,
and there was a lot of concern about it.
We have managed to develop
a regime for that,
that has achieved
an equilibrium of a kind.
So I imagine that something
is possible in this space,
but we would have to draw on
the prior experience
with things like drug testing
in the workplace, I think.
CA: I mean, one problem that we face
when you think about these
big systems introduced
is that in the past, there’s history
where something got introduced,
you think of the PATRIOT Act
that came in after 9/11
and a lot of people
have a lot of problems with that Act,
and it gets renewed
relentlessly, relentlessly,
and here we are, nearly 20 years later,
and it’s still with us.
So that creates quite a high bar
for any standard that we push out here.
How do we persuade people
that this is custom-made
for the current situation that we’re in,
and it’s not going to be picked up
and subsequently abused
by companies or by government?
DA: That’s an absolutely
critical question,
and I think we have a lot to learn
from places like Germany,
which are really, really strong
and rigorous on privacy protections.
Perhaps having some of the highest
privacy-protection standards in the world.
And Germany, over the course
of the last few weeks,
has articulated an approach
that definitely picks up
several of these elements.
So there are ways of building in
privacy structures
that are meeting the standards
of the German privacy framework,
and so I think for us, that’s a really
important place to look to,
and learn from them
how they’re structuring it,
to achieve those privacy protections.
CA: Danielle, you’re an ethicist,
among other things,
as well as a political theorist,
and is it, as you think about how
to apply ethical questions to this,
is it inherent in a situation like this
that there are going to be trade-offs,
that there is no “perfect solution”
that we just, you know –
These things are fundamentally –
You’ve got two goods that are
fundamentally in conflict with each other
or if you like, avoidance of two evils
that are going to clash.
And that we’re not going to get away
sort of untainted to some extent,
we just have to try and make
the least bad choice?
DA: It’s a great question, and I think,
I tend to formulate things as being
about hard choices and judgments,
rather than being about trade-offs.
I think trade-offs often suggest
that you can precisely quantify
this degree of monetizable harm
against that degree of monetizable harm,
and I think that’s actually not
as helpful to us in this current moment,
to be honest.
So in effect, I think
the most important thing
is that we clarify our core values.
And so the way
we’ve tried to articulate that
is to say we have a fundamental value
in securing public health.
We have a fundamental value
in securing a functioning,
healthy economy.
We have a fundamental value
in securing civil liberties and justice
and constitutional democracy.
And so then the question is,
given that set of fundamental values,
what are the policy options
that actually do secure
all of those things?
So in that regard, at the end of the day,
you know, there’s a bunch of libertarians
in the group that we work on,
and a lot of us come out very strongly,
sort of, privacy protecting,
liberty protecting point of view.
And so we’re not here
to sacrifice those things.
We’re rather here to find a solution
that aligns with the values
that we bring in to this problem.
So that’s how we think
about the decision making.
CA: Talk a bit more, actually,
about the group
that you’ve pooled together over this.
I know that there’s
a TED speaker Paul Romer,
an economist at Stanford,
who’s, I think, a key member.
Who else is in the group?
DA: Well, Paul was a key member.
I’m afraid we parted ways to some extent,
because he’s advocating random testing,
so the sort of 100 million
tests a day direction,
and he’s not a fan
of the contact-tracing approach,
so he does have, you know,
he’s sort of at one end
of a kind of libertarian spectrum on that
and my view, however,
is that testing 100 million a day
is far more intrusive
than smart testing supported
by privacy protective contact tracing.
I also think it’s really important
to throw into the mix
the fact that collective social distancing
is a huge infringement
on our civil liberties.
We keep forgetting that.
The alternative is not
contact tracing versus nothing,
it’s contact tracing
versus social distancing.
We can’t go out,
we can’t form associations
where we get to be together in person,
churchgoers can’t go to church right now.
You know, political parties
are having their conventions postponed.
If that’s not infringement
on our civil liberties,
I don’t know what is.
So from my point of view,
the civil liberties conversation
is one about the contrast
between the kind of infringement
that is produced by social distancing
versus the kind of
infringement or reshaping
that would be imposed
by contact-tracing regime.
I didn’t answer your question
about our group.
CA: Go ahead, it’s just amazing
this thing is moving so fast in real time.
Talk about some of the other people
who are in your group.
DA: Sure, so Glen Weyl
is an economist at Microsoft,
a political economist,
he’s a really key figure
and he is really an innovative
mechanism design thinker,
who is really good at kind of,
figuring out how to craft
incentive structures and so forth
that help people make choices
in socially productive ways,
in ways that are also
freedom-respecting, and so forth.
So he’s really been helping us think
about the design of the policy pathway,
Rajiv Sethi is another economist,
Lucas Stanczyk is a philosopher at Harvard
who has been scrutinizing
the civil liberties and justice questions.
I mean, that is his line of work,
those are the things
he’s most committed to,
and that’s what he’s doing.
We’ve reached out to a number
of public health groups
for regular consultations,
so they’re not as directly
part of our group
in the sense of advancing a policy,
but in terms of informing
our epidemiological understanding,
we’ve relied a lot on folks at the Chan
School of Public Health at Harvard.
So lawyers as well,
Glenn Cohen, who directs the Petrie-Flom
Center for law and bioethics
has been a critical member,
Andrew Crespo also at Harvard Law School,
Rosa Brooks at Georgetown Law school,
I could go on, I’m missing key people,
critical scientists.
Actually, there’s a great
paper on solidarity
by Melani Cammett and Evan Lieberman
that people should check out too.
CA: It’s exciting that one
of the impacts of this,
and I’ve seen it in other areas as well,
this crisis is really breaking
a lot of cross-disciplinary lines
and bringing people together
in unexpected combinations,
which is good.
DA: Yes.
CA: So how, if this plan
got general acceptance, how –
I mean, obviously,
the clock is ticking, this is urgent,
what would it look like
to move this forward?
Give a sense of what
you think it would cost,
give a sense of who might own it,
like, what would it take
to actually activate this giant idea?
DA: Alright, so it’s a big price tag,
so I hope you’re sitting down –
I’m glad you’re sitting down.
So over two years,
based on conservative estimates
of what you would need,
that is to say maximal estimates
for testing and things like that,
it’s got a price tag of 500 billion,
which includes both
the production of the tests
and the personnel of test administration,
contact tracing and all of that.
So it’s important to remember though,
that that production ramp up
and the contact tracing ramp up
are employment possibilities,
so in that regard, they would counteract
the negative impact on employment
of the social distancing.
So it’s a big price tag,
but it would be multipurpose
in that regard,
contributing to jumping up the economy,
as well as the testing program itself.
It would be important
that it be phased in,
and phasing it in would actually give us
a way of testing out the paradigm
as we went.
So for example,
for a first phase of rollout,
probably what you would want to do,
ideally by the end of the next month,
would be to have a full range of testing
for a combination of everybody
in the health care sector
and everybody who might fill in
and substitute for any health care
workers who test positive.
So in other words,
your health care worker pool
and a substitute pool,
say a national service corps,
of folks who can fill in
for health care workers who test positive.
If you can get those two groups,
those two sectors
fully under testing,
contact-tracing regime,
so you know that every
health care worker is not positive,
and anybody who is is immediately
quarantined and so forth,
we would stabilize
our public health infrastructure,
and that would already get
about 30 percent of the workforce
under this kind of testing
and tracing regime.
And then you’d move on,
with that stabilized,
to other critical
and essential workers, etc.
So the bad news, Chris, is you know,
who would be the last people
to be folded into this?
It would be you, it would be me,
the people who can actually
telecommute for work, OK.
Because we would have
the least call on social needs
to pull us back out into the workforce.
So we’d be the last ones out.
But that’s a good thing,
I think that’s a part of making the point
that we’re all in this together
and that there are sacrifices
in different places,
and service workers,
care workers and so forth
would be able to get out faster.
CA: And that addresses what is definitely
one of the most shocking
and painful aspects of the current moment,
which is, you know,
for those of us working from home
it feels traumatic,
but it’s nothing like
what others are experiencing,
whose livelihood depends
on being out there,
doing, you know, physical work.
And so I think it’s excellent, obviously,
that the plan focuses on them first.
How applicable is this to other countries?
You’re obviously talking –
The plan is developed for the US.
It’s inspired by what’s happened,
in some ways, in some Asian countries.
Is it applicable
to other countries as well?
DA: It absolutely is,
and we’re already seeing Europe
move in this way.
So Europe and the UK
are ahead of the US on this point,
I mean, the rough shape of the plan
that we’re proposing
seems to be pretty much the rough shape
of the plan that’s emerging
in Europe and the UK.
So I think it’s a really important moment
to bring together
those policy conversations,
bring together
those modeling conversations
and help each other out on this one.
CA: And I guess the reason
I’m delighted that you’re engaged in this
is that it’s –
You know, it’s fundamentally framed here
as this is a discussion
that society has to have.
There are ethical choices
we have to make here
as part of this.
And so we can’t just
leave it up to the scientists,
as brilliant as they are.
And the politicians, for goodness sake.
We all need to understand
what is at stake here,
what the choices are,
what the hard choices are
and know that any direction is tricky,
but we, you know –
This really matters.
DA: Absolutely.
I think you’ve put it so well.
I think that’s what makes this kind
of question different in a democracy.
It really is important that we all
collectively achieve understanding,
have clarity about the directional options
and have a sense of collectively moving
in a direction that we desire, right.
That we consent to, in a sense.
CA: Corey.
CH: Hi, I just wanted to come back
and give you a little feedback
on what people are saying online
in terms of the testing,
to be able to go back to work,
you know, how people feel about that.
Obviously, there’s lots of questions
about the app and privacy.
Some people are hesitant about it,
they’re wondering
whether it will be mandatory,
which you touched on.
Maybe you will opt in
to be able to go back in the office.
I’m in, I would test to be able
to go back in the office myself,
but I think people
are wondering about that.
But the general consensus is
it seems like a reasonable possibility.
There are a couple of questions.
One I think you just touched on
in terms of the global possibilities.
Do you see some collaboration
on the global landscape,
do you see people talking to each other?
Obviously, if we want
international travel to come back,
that seems like a key piece of it.
DA: Yes.
So I think travel is one
of the hardest pieces of this,
and actually I don’t think
that there are good,
clear answers on that yet.
Scientists are talking to each other
across international boundaries
without any questions.
I think the scientific
community is really well
and at work, really connected,
trying to think about these things.
It’s not clear to me how well-networked
the policy-making community is,
in all honesty.
So I think there’s probably
a lot of room for building
a tighter international network
of policy makers on that front.
And the hardest part
is going to be the travel piece.
And honestly, we haven’t even
talked about parts of the globe
like Africa or India, South America,
where they’re not yet getting towards
this policy paradigm.
So the virus is going to live
in the world, without any question.
And live in the world
probably in quite significant ways
for a considerable period of time.
So I think the role of travel restrictions
is probably going to be
with us for a spell.
And so it really does matter
that we get the design of those right.
I think it’s Hong Kong
that has a particularly,
what looks to me
like a sort of, useful regime,
where anybody who is coming into Hong Kong
for longer than two weeks
has to go into 14-day quarantine
when they arrive.
But for anybody who is coming
for a shorter time,
they have to be tested when they arrive
and then they have to also
go through active monitoring
during the period
of their time in Hong Kong,
which means having temperature checks
and so forth reported.
So I think that’s a reasonable thing to do
in order to keep
business travel up and running,
even as we’re all trying to deal
with controlling the virus.
CH: And you also mentioned solidarity
and I think that touches
on another question
that someone brought up online
about some of the social impacts
after the 1918 epidemic
and the fear,
and the, you know, the fear of the other,
and foreigners and all that.
And how do we get through this
without that kind of fallout
and you know, how do we,
kind of, keep ourselves together
and looking out for each other?
DA: I think that’s such
a hugely important question.
And I mean, in one sense it’s easy,
because the virus is an adversary
to every human being equally, right.
We are all completely equal
in relationship to it.
And so what we are really
all aspiring to here is
sort of transformation of our basic
socioeconomic infrastructure
in a way that puts us all
on a footing to be pandemic-resilient.
So I’ve been using the metaphor
we need to put ourselves on a war footing
to mobilize the economy
to fight the virus,
and I stand by that in a sense
that we do need to mobilize the economy.
But really at the end of the day,
it’s not a war against a human adversary
or anything of that kind.
And so what we’re really talking about
goes back to the questions
about the health infrastructure,
health care.
We’re really talking about achieving
a transformed peace situation
where our economies and our societies
are pandemic-resilient.
That’s the real goal here
and it really does require an investment,
so because of the 2003 SARS experience,
Asian nations have been investing
over the last five years or plus,
in pandemic-resilient equipment
and infrastructure.
We haven’t done that in the US,
so we find ourselves in a position
where we have to accelerate
in a matter of months,
something that has taken other people
years to build and develop.
So I think really focusing on that,
and the goal is an economy
that’s not vulnerable to pandemic, right.
I mean, because we don’t want
to leave this pandemic
and have the economy be
just as vulnerable to pandemic
at the end of the pandemic
as we were at the beginning of it.
We don’t want to be vulnerable this way.
And so in that regard,
the job is to build in that infrastructure
for pandemic resilience ASAP.
CA: Wow.
CH: Thank you.
CA: Danielle, given the price tag
you’re talking about on this,
half a trillion dollars, basically, up to.
That’s significantly less than some
of the multitrillion dollar numbers
that are getting thrown around,
so, I mean in terms
of the scale of the problem,
it’s probably an appropriate number.
But it sounds like,
to have any chance of doing this,
this would have to be
a kind of federal initiative
at some level.
DA: Yes.
CA: We have a problem
that more than half the country
fundamentally doesn’t trust
key parts of the administration,
let’s say.
How could this be framed
in a way that could build trust
and make it feel like
this is the country as a whole,
that there’s this coalition
of trusted voices
who are the final decision makers on this?
DA: So we have this incredible
federalist system,
and we need to see it as an asset.
It’s modularized and flexible,
and we need to activate that.
We do need all the parts
of the system working,
so we do need the federal
government working on behalf of this,
we need the state governments working
and municipal governments.
On the federal end of things,
we need Congress to fund.
So in the first instance,
there’s a really big need
for funding legislation,
and also, Congress can really help
by directing investment,
not just in the testing program itself,
but in the national service corps,
probably flowing
through state governments,
through the national –
The reserves in every state.
That would be sort of health reserves.
You know, really expand that program
with a combination of employment program
and backing up that sector.
So there’s a lot for Congress to do
as a part of this.
For the testing program, we really do need
the kind of procurement order
to produce capacity
that the Defense Department
is the best example of.
So in the ideal, a sort of
testing supply board
that brought in leading figures
who are masters of supply chain logistics
from the private sector,
working in close coordination
with the federal government
would be great.
The White House has recently,
in the last week or so,
begun to put in pieces
of architecture that goes in this way,
sort of a testing
supply czar, for example,
an admiral, I believe.
So we need people of that kind
who are really superb masters
of logistics, procurement,
contracts and that sort of thing,
to be able to ramp up
an active, functional supply chain
for testing to deliver at the order
of tens of millions of tests a day.
So we do need [unclear],
absolutely is a key part of that,
key driver of that.
And so it’s a time for all
the parts of our government
to come together and do
their respective pieces.
CA: So I’m kind of in awe
at the scale at which you’re thinking.
I guess as we wrap up here,
if I might, I’d love to just
go to a bit more personal place.
Like, I’m just curious about you
and what is it in your past
that is, sort of,
is providing the fire right now,
the drive to try to do this?
How are you?
How are you feeling about this?
Tell us a bit about you, please.
DA: Well, that’s a very generous question.
You know, I love this country.
I’ll admit that’s where
the motivation starts from,
in the sense that,
like, lots of people would say
that I’m a global humanitarian,
and watching the world
succumb to the disease motivates me.
I think of Paul Farmer for example,
as an example.
And I respect that and I get that,
but at the end of the day,
I love my country.
And it hurt, just hurt,
in the beginning of this,
and what hurt particularly,
was I was very clear, early on,
that I was getting better information
as a member of the Harvard faculty
than my fellow parishioners,
than the people who were serving me
in restaurants and cafes,
and it just like, that made me
angry, in all honesty.
As a combination
of those two things, I was like,
A, I want to understand this,
and B, I want to share what I understand
because it’s not fair
that people like me get it,
and that’s not being shared
with other people.
CA: Wow, that’s powerful.
I think all of us,
we all feel this weird mixture
of almost guilt at how fortunate
a position some of us are in.
Certainly a lot of gratitude, anger.
Were you persuaded, Whitney,
by this idea, by the possibility of it?
CH: Sorry, you’re meaning me.
CA: Sorry! (Laughs)
Did I say Whitney?
CH: Totally OK.
Whitney’s your usual pal.
CA: I’m the world’s worst person on names,
and Whitney and I have been
hanging out here the last few weeks.
Corey.
CH: It’s absolutely fine.
Being mistaken for Whitney
is a huge compliment.
It’s very persuasive,
and I think so hopeful to hear
a constructive plan
and a feeling that there is a path
out of this that is both possible for us
as humans,
to get back to being together,
but then also as an economy
and as a country.
I’m really inspired by your work
and so grateful to you
for sharing it with us.
DA: I appreciate that, thank you.
I’m really glad to get a chance
to talk about it
and share the knowledge
that our group has acquired
over the last month.
So thank you.
CA: So if someone wants to keep in touch
with the progress of this idea,
what should they do?
DA: OK, so now I should know
our website URL by heart,
but of course, I don’t, I’m afraid.
If somebody googles “COVID,”
“Safra,” “Allen,” that’s my surname,
our website will come up.
So if you just remember those three words,
“COVID,” “Safra,” “Allen,”
and Google that,
you should get to our white papers,
op-eds, things like that.
We are hoping to have
our full policy road map
published by the end of the week.
That’s our target goal.
CA: Yeah. It’s: ethics.harvard.edu.
DA: OK.
Exactly, that takes you
to the main landing page,
and then to the COVID site.
CA: And then to the COVID-19
from there, yeah.
DA: Exactly.
CA: Alright, well,
thank you so much, Danielle,
I found this absolutely fascinating.
DA: Thank you.
CA: It’s going to take –
I mean, this is not an ordinary idea.
We don’t often at TED
have someone come and say,
“Yeah, I’ve got this idea
for how to spend half a trillion dollars,
and it could make a difference
between the US
and other places around the world
actually getting the economy going again.
That’s not usual, so this has been
a gift to us today, thank you for that.
DA: Thank you.
CA: To everyone listening,
this is an important debate.
And it’s not finished yet,
there will be many other contributions
to ideas like this, I think.
DA: That’s for sure.
CA: Yeah, chip in, chip in.
Thank you all so much
for being part of this today.
We’re back again tomorrow.
Corey, do you have details on that?
CH: I do.
And also, you can listen
to this conversation
on our website TED.com or on Facebook,
and you can also listen
to the recording of it
through TED Interview.
So if you missed any parts of it
or you want to pass it along to a friend.
We have some more
amazing speakers coming up
I might glance at my cheat sheet,
but tomorrow we have Esther Choo,
who is an emergency
physician and professor
and she is going to share
with us what she’s seen
on the front lines of this crisis.
On Wednesday, Chris and I
will be speaking with Ray Dalio,
the founder of Bridgewater,
and he is going to address
the market and economic
implications of this pandemic.
And on Thursday, we have two speakers,
Gayathri Vasudevan,
who is going to share with us
what’s happening in India,
and Fareed Zakaria, a journalist.
Friday, we’ll wrap things up
with a musician and artist Jacob Collier.
So we have a lot
of amazing things coming up.
CA: We do, so calendar it if you can,
apart from anything else,
we just like your company here every day.
We’ll get through this together.
Thanks so much for being part of this.
Danielle, thanks again.
DA: Thank you, goodbye.
CH: Bye.