The Pandemic Information Gap/Solution

COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a lack of good information. A pandemic is essentially an information problem: this is the enlightening and provocative idea at the heart of this book. If we solve the information problem, argues economist Joshua Gans, we can defeat the virus. For example, when we don't know who is infected, we have to act as if everyone is infected. If we actively manage the information problem—if we know who is infected and with whom they had contact—we can suppress the virus or buy time for vaccine development.

Emphasizing that pandemic-induced economic crises are different from past recessions, Gans maps the phases of the pandemic economy and the information needed at each stage to enable recovery. He argues that we should insulate businesses from failure and workers from job loss, and describes economic policy approaches that would help achieve this. He discusses pandemic communication strategies, privacy and public health information, and methods for handling potential vaccine shortages. To innovate our way out of this crisis, Gans argues, we must think creatively and take the long view. Pandemics may be unpredictable, but they can be planned for, and this book provides a roadmap to do so.

Covid-19 is a global pandemic inflicting large health and economic costs. In his previous book, The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2020), economist Joshua Gans explains that those costs have been so large because governments and others have lacked the information needed to control the pandemic. Unless we know who is infectious, we can't break the chains of transmission, which results in the escalation of our problems. Pandemics, he writes, are information problems.

Now, in this follow-up book, Gans outlines the solution to the information gap. By engaging in rapid, frequent screening, we can control the pandemic and restore normality. We can lower the number of cases, break chains of transmission, and make it safe for people to interact again. This will require changing our mindset about testing, gathering the right information, and matching that information to the right decisions. We have the ingredients to do all these things. We just need to put them together in a scalable and sustainable system. This book is a guide to the issues and trade-offs that policymakers and other key decision-makers need to grapple with and follow.

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REVIEWS

  • MyIPO (12 February 2021): “In a time when Covid-19 variants are emerging and possibly reducing the efficacy of current vaccines, The Pandemic Information Solution is a must-read for public health officials and government leaders around the world.”

  • Benjamin Green in SpringerLink (6 June 2020): “Written in an unpretentious conversational style, Economics in the Age of Covid-19 … provides an accessible overview of the past, present, and future economic choices confronting nations grappling against the viral pandemic of Covid-19.”

  • Peter Chadwick in IEDP (2 June 2020): “As we contend with social distancing and its implications for our lives and businesses, and in many cases grieve over the tragic loss of human life, it is difficult to look ahead of the current uncertainty and chaos. This book helps us to find that longer-term perspective.”

  • Philip Ball in Nature (15 May 2020): “It’s a shame that policymakers did not have books such as Joshua Gans’s Economics in the Age of COVID-19 to lay out the issues for them in January. It is remarkable that they do already.”

MEDIA

Original Edition

The Pandemic Information Gap is an expanded version of an eBook, as Economics in the Age of COVID-19, originally published in April 2020 by MIT Press First Reads.