Social distancing, sheltering in place and other mitigation efforts are critical to blunting the impact of the current pandemic, despite the havoc they wreak on daily routines and markets. However, we know that the sooner we can return to safely congregating, the better. How can we get there? We need to put as much data and computing power into the problem as we can, and now.
The first step is getting the basics in order. We need rapid and available testing capabilities. We also need adequate supplies of personal protective equipment for health care workers and others on the front lines, along with ventilators and other lifesaving treatments.
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The next step is developing smart prevention capabilities. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, efforts are underway to use existing mobile technologies to quickly develop privacy preserving contact tracing. When someone tests positive for COVID-19, health care providers could download the names of those who were in proximity to the infected individual during the relevant time frame without accessing their comings and goings. With that anchoring information, computer scientists could then integrate data from a broad swath of sources to forecast precise community-level infection risks.
That data would allow more dynamic risk assessments, sufficiently precise and current to allow us to decide not whether schools and workplaces should be open but which ones should be open, and for how long. Such targeted isolation strategies would create challenges, too. Starting and stopping operations on the basis of current risk is not trivial; it can wreak havoc on supply chains and daily routines.
Adapting such measures to fight the pandemic might teach us that physical presence is not always as necessary as we had thought. Remote work may simply become part of how we think about work. Here, too, computing could allow us to finely weigh the risks and benefits of having people work alongside one another.
We need to not only soften the blow of curtailed timelines and busted budgets but fundamentally redesign the way essential services are delivered and preserve the functions of society. We have the people. We have the data. We have the computational force. We need to deploy them now.hbr
