Opinion | A Plan to Get America Back to Work

“O.K.,’’ I said, calling Katz by phone at his home in Connecticut after reading his article, “but we are where we are now. Most states and cities have basically committed to some period of horizontal social distancing and sheltering in place. So, can we make lemonade out of this lemon — and not destroy our economy?’’

I don’t see why not, he answered. “Now that we have shut down almost everything, we still have the option of pivoting to a more targeted approach. We may even be able to leverage the current effort at horizontal, population-wide, interdiction to our advantage as we pivot to vertical, risk-based, interdiction.’’

How? “Use a two-week isolation strategy,’’ Katz answered. Tell everyone to basically stay home for two weeks, rather than indefinitely. (This includes all the reckless college students packing the beaches of Florida.) If you are infected with the coronavirus it will usually present within a two-week incubation period.

“Those who have symptomatic infection should then self-isolate — with or without testing, which is exactly what we do with the flu,’’ Katz said. “Those who don’t, if in the low-risk population, should be allowed to return to work or school, after the two weeks end.”

Effectively, we’d ‘reboot’ our society in two or perhaps more weeks from now. “The rejuvenating effect on spirits, and the economy, of knowing where there’s light at the end of this tunnel would be hard to overstate. Risk will not be zero, but the risk of some bad outcome for any of us on any given day is never zero.’’

Meanwhile, we should do our best to sequester from any contact with potential carriers the elderly, people with chronic diseases and the immunologically compromised for whom coronavirus is most dangerous. And “we could potentially establish subgroups of health professionals, tested to be negative for coronavirus, to tend preferentially to those at highest risk,” Katz added.

This way, Katz said, “the most vulnerable are carefully shielded until the infection has run its course through the rest of us — and the tiny fraction of those of us at low risk who do develop severe infection nonetheless get expert medical care from a system not overwhelmed. … We are not counting on zero spread after the two weeks; we cannot achieve zero spread under any scenario. We are counting on minimization of severe cases by sheltering the most vulnerable from spread whether by those with, or those without, symptoms.’’