8 highlights
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Despite a month of shutdowns and distancing measures, the virus hasn’t stopped spreading, but the rate of new infections has gone down.
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In absolute terms, however, the number of new infections is still much higher in the United States, because the over-all number of cases is so large.
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But many governors, medical experts, business leaders, and economists are highly skeptical about the extent of testing, which is still largely confined to people who have already developed symptoms. The key to keeping down the infection rate is locating and isolating asymptomatic carriers and then doing contact tracing.
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The only available options, he said, are continued shutdowns or a massive expansion of testing to find and isolate asymptomatic carriers before they spread the disease.
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Absent large-scale testing, the outlook is grim, he said. “As soon as we stop the shutdowns, we’ll go right back to exponential growth. It won’t even help us much if we get down to very low rates of infection first, because exponential growth is so fast you get right back there very quickly.”
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Romer suggested that the most likely outcome is a series of reopenings and renewed shutdowns, as the infection rate rebounds.
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First, initial reopening timelines often prove too optimistic. Second, even countries at the forefront of reopening have gradual and conservative plans. Third, recovery is easier and quicker in manufacturing and construction than in consumer services.
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For 2020 as a whole, Goldman Sachs is predicting that G.D.P. will decline by more than five per cent. That would be the biggest fall since the aftermath of the Second World War.