U.S. must spend $75 billion to fix flawed Covid-19 testing, report says

The U.S. should invest $75 billion in order to fix its badly flawed system of diagnostic testing for Covid-19, according to a bipartisan committee of industry experts, investors, scientists, and former federal health officials assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation.

“America faces an impending disaster,” the foundation’s panel warns in a 55-page report released Thursday. “The extraordinary scale of the Covid-19 crisis is evident in the growing deaths and economic losses the pandemic has wrought in every state.” The report adds: “This terrifying tragedy was not and is not inevitable.”

The report, which includes among its authors several former commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration and a who’s who of researchers in pandemic preparedness and diagnostic testing, suggests several steps for improving the U.S. response, including a dramatic ramp-up in different types of tests. The Rockefeller Foundation is also committing $100 million to the global coronavirus response.

Rajiv Shah, the foundation’s president, said he could point to “half a dozen, maybe three dozen” other countries, including South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, and Germany, that have done better than the U.S. by using widespread diagnostic testing to identify people who are sick early and better control the spread of the virus.

Testing, Shah said during a media briefing, is “the legitimate way out of the conundrum of either having tens of thousands, now hundreds of thousands, of Americans die of Covid-19 or having a lockdown that forces economic pain.” Paul Romer, a report co-author and the co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, estimates shutdowns cost the U.S. economy $300 billion to $400 billion a month.

Related: How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.