Coronavirus tests should be as cheap as a ‘morning latte’ to overcome the crisis, says top economist

Cheap testing kits as easy to buy as a ‘morning latte’ would help to curb the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, according to a top economist. 

Paul Romer, a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018, believes kits should be available to pick up every morning from drive-throughs for less than $10 (£8.60). 

The professor said more availability would allow for anyone who has a negative test in the last 24 hours to ‘go to work, go to restaurants or take a flight’, for example.

Earlier this week, Mr Romer tweeted: ‘COVID-19 test should be like a latte. 

‘Get them each morning, less than $10, available at drive-through.

‘We shrank computers bigger than a room to fit in your pocket. If we try, we can vastly improve testing. Probably for less than $850 billion.’

The American economist also urged the US government to contribute some of the money for protecting its economy towards improving and distributing testing kits.

He told The Telegraph: ‘The current plan is for the US government to spend something in the order of $1 trillion to protect the economy. 

‘If it spends just 10 per cent of that on scaling out and improving tests for Covid-19, we could soon reach the goal of frequent, universal testing that imposed only a tiny disruption in our lives.’

The newspaper reported that Britain and the US have some of lowest testing rates in the world – and testing in the US had to be done manually until this week. 

Testing is far more aggressive in other countries, such as South Korea which has tested 3,700 people per million. Britain has done 600 per million and the US 100 per million. 

Mr Romer added: ‘Getting a test should be like getting a latte – something everyone does each day that takes only a few minutes, and is available at a drive-up window.’

It follows Boris Johnson pledging to urgently increase coronavirus testing on Wednesday, saying that a ‘game-changing’ new test will be offered to hundreds of thousands of people as soon as possible.

Speaking from Downing Street, he added that the UK was in negotiations to buy vast quantities of a simple ‘antibody test’ to show if someone has had the virus and recovered from it.

But the urgency contrasts his position in the early stages of the outbreak which saw him insist the UK was ‘extremely well-prepared’ with a ‘fantastic testing system’. 

Since then Mr Johnson and Britain’s top medical officers have spoken of the need to ‘scale up’ and have a ‘big increase’ in testing from 5,000 people a day to 250,000. 

If people test positive in the ‘antibody test’, they will be deemed fit to return to work because they will not be able to contract the virus again and pass it on.

A simple and quick test on such a scale would allow the economy and daily life to return to normal much more quickly by identifying those who are not a risk to others 

Mr Johnson said yesterday: ‘UK experts and scientists expect to start trials for the first vaccine within a month. And above all we’re getting better at testing.

‘We’re in negotiations today to buy a so-called antibody test, as simple as a pregnancy test, which can tell whether you have had the disease. 

‘It’s early days, but if it works as its proponents claim, then we will buy literally hundreds of thousands of these kits as soon as practicable.

‘It has the potential to be a total game-changer.’