I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France. It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable).
So what’s next after that? The key of course as always will be innovation.
The single most urgent piece here is testing. Ideally we can get this to the point where people can test themselves, but short of that we need to broadly deploy the kind of drive-through testing that’s become common in several Asian countries.
In terms of pharmaceutical innovation, the two crucial pieces we need to race for are better treatments and ultimately a vaccine. On the treatment side there are some signs that remdesivir may help. There is also experimentation with the HIV drugs lopinavir/ritonavir, as well as reports of positive effects from the malaria drug chloroquine. On the vaccine side lots of potential vaccines are being developed but testing them will take time and finding an effective one won’t be easy.
In terms of other healthcare innovation, we will need to figure out how to rapidly build a lot more ventilators as it appears that 10% of all those infected may need it. There is at least one open source initiative underway to tackle that.
But medical innovation isn’t the only kind of innovation required. There is also innovation in many other fields.
Take education as an example. We need to figure out how people can learn from home using the many tools and services that have been developed for that over the last few years. There are several great efforts underway here, such as this website with resources for parents. Our portfolio company Outschool is actively recruiting more teachers to its platform to address the surging demand. Susan and I homeschooled our kids and we believe that’s an important innovation that can be much more widely adopted.
And then there is social innovation. It appears a crucial moment in time to trial a basic income at the Federal level. Many people cannot support themselves for even a week without income and lots of jobs, especially freelance jobs, will contract dramatically. There is already a bill developed by the Economic Security project to dramatically expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. But ideally we would go even further and just let people open accounts at the Fed that can be credited with a basic income (the same way the Fed creates money for banks).
We are extremely fortunate to have a whole new set of capabilities at our disposal for confronting this crisis. Let’s use them to be as innovative as we possibly can to help save as many lives as possible but also transform the way we live. While terrifying and coming at a huge cost, the COVID19 pandemic is also an opportunity to progress towards a World After Capital.
