How to Stop a Coronavirus

Abstract

The socioeconomic costs of the current global coronavirus outbreak are difficult to estimate. For many countries these costs may be devastating. The poorest and most vulnerable in human populations may bear the costs of the outbreak disproportionately. The purpose of this note is to pose and try to answer the question: How can we stop this coronavirus outbreak? I suggest that the answers are right in front of us. A verbatim quote from Rees (2014:401) illustrates how we might already be on the right track: It is 300 years since the British government pioneered a new approach to problem-solving. The Longitude Act of 1714 offered a prize of £20,000 (worth more than £1 million today) to anyone who could devise an accurate method to determine a ship’s position at sea. Among those on the committee that judged the merit of the entries was the serving Astronomer Royal. History is repeating itself. In 2014, there is a pressing need for the United Kingdom to channel more brainpower into innovation, to jump-start new technologies and to enthuse young people. There are broad societal problems that demand fresh thinking. So Britain is reconvening the historic Longitude Committee, this time with a promised reward of £10 million (US$17 million). Some things are different: in 2014, the challenge to be addressed by the Longitude Prize will be decided not by government officials, but by the public. And some things are the same: as Astronomer Royal, I chair the resurrected committee. If this methodology has already changed the path of history by providing a method to determine a ship’s position at sea, then it can surely be used to solve the coronavirus problem. Whereas crowdsourced research and development (R&D) has demonstrated success in contexts of medical research (Callaghan, 2015) there are useful applications of crowdsourcing to obtain economies of scale in research problem solving, according to the principles of networked science (Nielsen, 2012). Why then is this methodology not being used to stop the coronavirus? The problem with this methodology is its need to attract the attention and time investments of experts. A way to do this is to radically increase the value of the prize. A few billion Pounds will simply not cut it. I suggest the following solution. Each country in the world is facing catastrophic costs related to the spreading pandemic. If each country could pledge the estimated costs it will face in the next 36 months as a prize, and if most countries in the world contribute, it is possible to offer a trillion-Pound prize. At this scale, such a prize will surely create an incentive ‘shock’ to the global RD Callaghan, 2018; Hayek, 1945; Nielsen, 2012). It is perhaps only at this scale that it will be possible to halt the catastrophic spread of the virus, and the socioeconomic turmoil that follows in its wake. The time to act is now, before it is too late.