Effective pandemic management that minimises economic harm

 1. Ensuring the physical distancing of people residing in different households. While one metre is often recommended as the minimal distance, COVID-19 transmissibility continues to decrease significantly with greater distance.

2. Investing massively in expanding the number of tests, particularly for groups at high risk of COVID-19 infection and of transmitting the disease such as doctors and nurses, nursing home staffs, workers at meat processing plants, teachers, cashiers, and employees in public transportation. An important feature of this intervention is making sure that those who want to be tested do get tested within a short period of time – ideally in dedicated testing facilities separate from other patients.

3. Provided that enough testing capacity is available for the groups at high risk of infection or high risk of spreading the disease, massive testing on a large scale (at the city or even the country level) is likely to be a less harmful approach than local or country-wide lockdowns.

4. Providing community isolation centres for asymptomatic, mild, or moderate COVID-19 patients who are unable or not safe to isolate at home, such as people who live in crowded conditions or those who need some basic care and treatment (CDC 2020). The risk of intra-family transmission is very high and is, indeed, currently the largest source of new infections in many countries.

5. Mandating the use of face masks in all indoor places where people interact and aiming to provide – free of charge – high-filtration FFP2 and FFP3 masks (with minimum filtration efficiencies of 94% and 99%, respectively) to those who must interact directly with others.

6. Prohibiting all unnecessary indoor gatherings and facilitating outdoor events with strict application of social distancing measures and mask mandates until working vaccines become widely available.

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