“The fundamental decision that every society has to make is, can we suppress this virus forever if necessary? Can we afford to do that?...If you know that you're going to give up, there's no point to suppress for a while.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer is accustomed to seeing the big picture of a problem—and offering big solutions. In the case of COVID-19, he proposes a comprehensive “test and isolate” policy that would keep the infection rate low while allowing the economy to ramp up.

He also proposes two billion-dollar national prizes to scale up testing: one for “the first lab that can process 10 million tests per day” and another for a simple, home-based test “so everybody could just test themselves and find out if they or any of their family members are infectious,” he tells Mike on the podcast.