“The fundamental decision that every society has to make is, can we suppress this virus forever if necessary? Can we afford to do that? … If you know that you're going to give up, there's no point to suppress for a while.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer is accustomed to seeing the big picture of a problem – and offering big solutions. In the case of COVID-19, he proposes a comprehensive “test and isolate” policy that would keep the infection rate low while allowing the economy to ramp up.

He also proposes billion-dollar national prizes to scale up testing: one for “the first lab that can process 10 million tests per day” and another for a simple, home-based test “so everybody could just test themselves and find out if they or any of their family members are infectious.”