The Rockefeller Foundation has taken leadership on developing strategies to deal with COVID-19. They have created the position of Managing Director, Pandemics and appointed and expert in the field, Dr. Jonathan "Jono" Quick MD to fill the position. Quick is author of a book entitled "End of Pandemics." They also have funded an initiative at Arizona State University called The COVID-19 Diagnostics Commons to build a comprehensive database on testing resources. And they have funded a national action plan, the National COVID-19 Testing and Tracing Plan which is described below.
Pandemics sicken and kill people in three ways: first by overwhelming patients’ immune defenses, then by swamping hospital networks, and eventually by cutting off a community’s economic lifeblood. Hence, “saving lives or saving the economy” is a false choice. As of April 19, Covid-19 had directly killed more than 163,000 people worldwide, including nearly 35,000 in the United States. But the indirect effects are still being counted. The Great Recession of 2008, for instance, killed people in the thousands by disrupting healthcare for mothers, children and those with chronic illnesses and increasing a host of deadly mental and social conditions like alcoholism, depression and domestic abuse.
Dr. Rajiv Shah is President of the Rockefeller Foundation
Launch a 1-3-30 Plan to Dramatically Expand Covid-19 Testing
We are proposing our nation come together around the bold, ambitious, but achievable goal of rapidly expanding testing capacity to 30 million tests per week over the next six months. This 1-3-30 Plan would be achieved by: (1) creating an Emergency Network for Covid-19 Testing to coordinate and underwrite the testing market, (2) launching an eight-week National Testing Laboratory Optimization Initiative to increase output to 3 million tests per week from the current one million, and (3) investing in a Testing Technology Accelerator to further grow U.S. testing capacity from 3 million to 30 million tests per week. The steady increase in U.S. testing that began in late February has now plateaued. During the first two weeks of April, the number of tests per day averaged 143,000 (~ 1 million tests per week) with no appreciable upward trend.[i] As of April 18, 2020, the U.S. had completed 3,698,534 tests of which 722,182 were positive (19.50%) This undoubtedly reflects just the tip of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Current barriers to rapid increases in American test production, supply, distribution and administration include uncertainty over financing and payment; lack of coordination of local, state, and national purchases; uneven distribution of test kits; severe shortages of reagents; regulatory barriers; and a severe lack of staffing. The 1-3-30 Plan aims to overcome these barriers and progressively expand testing from the current one million to three million and then to 30 million tests per week through three action steps.ACTION STEPS:



Launch a Covid Community Healthcare Corps for testing and contact tracing
The taking and preparation of samples, analysis of testing, and human-centered privacy-protected contact tracing will require a massive amount of manpower that can be stood up in the next few weeks by federal, state, and local hiring authorities with funding offered via block grants to states. The number of tests needed to successfully prevent recurrent outbreaks while allowing some relaxation of social distancing will depend on the vigilance of contact tracing. With the kind of high-precision contact tracing used in South Korea, just 2.5 to 5 million tests per day would be required. With the imprecise tracing of a country like Taiwan, 30 million tests per day would be needed – a level far beyond present capacities.ACTION STEPS:



Create a Covid-19 Data Commons and Digital Platform
Real-time analyses of resource allocations, disease tracing results and patient medical records will enable policy makers and researchers to make best use of available resources to identify the most promising areas for surges in testing volumes to snuff out Covid-19 recurrent outbreaks and identify the most promising therapeutic treatments and algorithms.ACTION STEPS:


