Butler Seminar - Michael Mina - Harvard - September 9, 2020

“SARS-CoV-2: Can we test our way out of this?”

Abstract: The world wasn’t prepared for SARS-CoV-2. The public health infrastructure required to detect and stop global spread of a rapidly transmitting respiratory virus wasn’t up to the task. In the US, the failure of the US state and federal public health laboratories was a dramatic display of the devastation that decades of neglecting and devaluing public health can have. But let’s not let the failings of yesterday temper our expectations for tomorrow. Hitting rock bottom offers new freedoms to rethink how we can tackle a virus like SARS-CoV-2. This talk will discuss the blunders of the US testing program, the advances that can be made, and how a new era of widescale, frequent, rapid at-home tests can elicit strong herd effects to suppress population spread and aid society in a return to normalcy.