Nobel economist Paul Romer: impossible barriers of thought in the fight against the virus



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Economics professor Paul Romer advocates a solution to the pandemic crisis that many say is unfeasible. That Romer thinks he has no imagination.

– These counterarguments don’t hold when you call them! he says on the phone to DN.

But then Paul Romer is also the world’s leading expert on how man makes seemingly impossible things happen. “About the possibility of progress” was the subject of his 2018 Nobel Conference.

He received the award for his research on knowledge drivers. And how useful ideas and inventions are spread in society.

No resource is endless except human. That is the message of technological optimist Paul Romer.

Those who say that this does not work are caught in a passivity, a learned helplessness. Instead, we should think that people are smart and that we have all our economies at our disposal, says Paul Romer.

The pandemic has concerned, in part due to financial consequences.

– The deep depression that we can face now does not worry me just because it creates inequality and suffering. Unemployment is probably around 20 percent in the United States now. I am also concerned that it may create political garbage that really destroys democracy, he says.

Paul Romer received the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.

Paul Romer received the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.

Photo: Nicklas Thegerstrom

But the infection has also frustrated him with what he sees as inability to think and fatalism in the fight against the virus.

– At the moment the virus jumped from animal to human, it seemed that we were faced with two alternatives. Or we let this spread in the population, with many deaths as a result. Or we try to keep it away by closing our communities in a way that is completely unsustainable. It would be a terrible fate if it really was the only thing we could do.

The third alternative that he has dedicated in recent months to submerge and carry out is, instead, mass testing.

It sounds familiar “Test, test, test,” says the WHO.

But Paul Romer advocates a form of intensive virus screening across the population that only needs to be combined with one other measure: whoever tests positive for sars-cov-2 should stay home for two weeks. Infection monitoring is not required. There are no apps to map contacts, which raises privacy concerns. Nor is there any social distance for the healthy person.

But it is important to find enough, not necessarily all, of those who are contagious at once and isolate them. Then society can open up while the epidemic continues.

The problem is that it requires a lot of testing. Many tests.

Together with the KI teachers Sten Linnarsson and Jussi Taipale, Paul Romer, recently completed a study supporting the reasoning of epidemiological models.

– We never met, but we met online and found that we had the same thoughts. Jussi and Sten know molecular biology, says Paul Romer.

The joint research article, which has not yet been published in any scientific journal, can be seen as a thought experiment: if all infection control measures were discontinued, how much would it take to control the virus and the number of reproduction, R , below the important limit 1?

The answer is that about a tenth of the population would be assessed every day according to a continuous schedule. In Sweden, that would mean a million tests a day. To compare with the few thousand that are being done now.

A similar proposal for an “exit strategy” was recently put forward by a British research team in the scientific journal The Lancet.

Is this really feasible?

– It is really very simple to read a gene in a virus. We believe the cost can be reduced from $ 100 per test to $ 1.

Many of those working with the tests say that a shortage of material is a major problem. How to solve it?

– Name any bottleneck so that we have a possible solution.

Lack of reagents, that is, substances necessary in the laboratory?

– The most critical reagents are used to extract the RNA from the samples, but it has been shown that it is not necessary to extract it, but that it can be sequenced directly. Then that problem can be solved.

Lack of test sticks?

– In the same way, you can use saliva samples, according to studies. Test pins are not required.

Paul Romer is thus convinced that millions of daily tests are realistic. It points to alternative laboratory methods, where many samples are run in parallel on machines. And in progress with the self-assessment.

He asks a rhetorical question: If the United States economy can produce and distribute 300 million cans of soda every day, how can it be impossible to do 30 million virus tests? The problem is bureaucracy, not the capacity of the economy.

The social challenge, says Paul Romer, is not of the same nature as the moon landing, but rather like having to organize a short-term Olympiad.

– There is a lot of work that requires improvisation. But this is not a completely new problem that we don’t know how to solve. Those who say that this does not work are caught in a passivity, a learned helplessness. Instead, we should think that people are smart and that we have all our economies at our disposal.

Partially leaning versus your own experience, on how new technology is affected and how fast costs fall when systems are brought back to scale.

But he also relies on the knowledge of Sten Linnarsson and Jussi Taipale.

– There are no technical restrictions that make it impossible to test one million per day. These methods used are everyday foods for molecular biologists. The challenge is logistics. But why should a rich and well-developed country not accept this challenge? says Sten Linnarsson.

What do you say to government experts who claim that mass testing is not profitable?

– Those who say it probably think about their usual budget. You may not have seen the value because you have not been able to get used to the large sums that can be dealt with in the social economy. When you count on that, economists say, that sounds really cheap.

Sten Linnarsson also emphasizes that the idea of ​​intensive screening can be seen as a complement to other measures. It doesn’t have to be either or. Social distancing has the same goal, to reduce infection. Here, larger-scale testing can be a tool that, along with others, works for the long term.

Paul Romer also says that the long term is important.

– The virus is called sars-cov-2. We had number one, and it may be number three. And vaccines are not sure to work. So we have to adapt, he says.

– I think previous epidemics like Ebola invaded us with a false sense of security that such things can be stopped. It was a mistake For us economists, it is also a lesson that the economy now seems so fragile and fragile. We must dedicate more power to make it more robust in the future.

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