Quarantine Exit Strategy Transition

To provide a safe societal reintegration solution that people trust through transparency and inclusion in the process. To identify building blocks of safe societal reintegration using the Quarantine Exit Strategy Transition (QuEST) concept. This concept is accomplished by combining individually sourced information, transparent test kit manufacturing, optimizing test kit distribution, and test results reading feedback. Transparency is the key factor for one primary reason, to build trust between the people and resilient systems designed to solve a systemic problem, like a pandemic. The benefits of leveraging transparent supply and demand concepts extend beyond this virus visibility application. Other humanity resilience tests using transparent supply and demand concepts stand to benefit from this concept, such as food allocation, medical assistance, and disaster relief. This concept benefits everyone by giving people a voice of needed resources while aligning common care needs for a global society.

To assist in making informed decisions about safe societal reintegration people need consistent, verifiable, reliable, and timely information. Extended quarantine has highlighted society's disjointedness about taking appropriate actions during a pandemic and the result has crippled the safety of our society and has stalled our economy. This is seen in the growing number of deaths linked to COVID-19 currently at 116K in the United States and globally over 400k according to https://ourworldindata.org/. Also, in the United States unemployment has risen from 4% to 14% in 4 months according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf. Additionally, according to a study conducted recently of 5,800 small businesses https://www.nber.org/papers/w26989.pdf, results that "many small businesses are financially fragile" and “businesses have widely varying beliefs about the likely duration of COVID related disruptions”. 

People need consistent, verifiable, reliable, and timely information to make informed decisions. 

Viruses, like the wind, are invisible to the eye. To see the wind we can observe the way a tree moves. Similarly, to see a virus we can observe the way people move. To see effects of a pandemic in a global community however takes a new method of systematic observation, an early warning feedback system.

A manufacturing feedback loop that uses supply and demand processes, to increase information transparency and decrease ambiguity.

To achieve the goal, four steps are proposed:

1) Identify risk centers based on individual risk factors.

“Individual risk factor” provides a demand measurement - who is most likely to come into contact with a virus or risk virus contact to others? This provides structure for an early warning virus detection feedback loop (i.e. Virus Visibility).

2) Test Manufacturing & Distribution Supply Chain based on a transparent centralized and decentralized hybrid supply structure.

Tracking fluctuations of test kit availability numbers provides a measurement of supply – what manufacturing centers are creating test kits, what are their current and future availability numbers, and distribution rates?

3) Phased Priority Distribution to systematically prioritize a phased distribution test validation system.

Continuously prioritize distribution of test kits to the highest risk areas, reducing the risk of infection by early detection and isolation to mitigate “risk spikes” per geographic location. This approach scales; regionally, nationally, then globally.

4) Test Result Reading Center for continuous feedback providing transparency.

Systems approach to test results receiving and reading. Completes the virus visibility feedback loop needed for virus visibility during a pandemic.

This solution potentially serves everyone. The constraint depends on the amount of resource investment and governance support through policy reform.

Essential / Non-essential employees - Measuring the primary risk centers during a crisis by determining where most interactions take place during a crisis, establishes the essential workforce.

Front line workforce: Doctors, Nurses
First responders: Emergency Medical Technicians, Police Officers, Firefighters
Military: Front line and First responders
Services, supplies, and other supporting infrastructure workforce: grocery store workers, food delivery workers, package/mail delivery workers, assisted living caretakers, housekeepers, etc.

Measuring the secondary risk centers during a crisis by determining where the least interactions take place during a crisis, establishes the non-essential workforce. 

People considered non-essential workforce are the all people at home. These people are cooperating, waiting for trusted confirmation to go back out into public. They should have transparency to verify low risk over a period of time, be tested individually when test kit availability numbers increase (before they reintegrate), early detection numbers are baselined, and threat of infection decreases. While that risk is much lower than essential workforce due to the lessened amount of daily interactions, these people should be tested due to potential for asymptomatic infections.

QuEST's virus visibility proposal seeks to track the spread of an emerging outbreak to inform decision making. This is completed through transparent crowd sourced information displayed on a map to make the invisible virus visible and applies a manufactured feedback loop for early warning detection.

QuEST is a proactive solution for long term pandemic resilience and is preventative in nature considering early warning detection.

The transparent supply chain initiative has potential to improve multiple industry supply chains. 

The Ethical Treatment Strategy is highlighted as a need in this proposal to support people during quarantine.

Using supply and demand inputs through crowd sourced information and transparent manufacturing of test kits, the short term output is virus visibility. This links to the long term outcome of societal pandemic resilience.