Taking Back Control: a Resetting of America’s Response to Covid-19

Our third Action Plan lays out a new plan for the largest domestic testing scale up to date and proposes 14 executive actions for the current and incoming administrations to take in order to rapidly alter the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States. Testing all U.S. public K-12 public schools would cost $42.5 billion, or $8.5 billion per month for the remainder of the school year from February to June 2021.

The end is in sight. Yet there is a long way to go. We need to continue to ramp up Covid-19 testing and put in place policies that recognize the cascading benefits of getting back to work, going back to school and taking back control of our lives.

Covid-19 vaccines have arrived, with enough supply to vaccinate as many as 50 million people by the end of January. But these initial doses will do little in the short term to arrest an epidemic that is raging out of control. The United States is now reporting more than one million new coronavirus cases every week, hospitals are nearing capacities, and daily death tolls are at record levels. More Americans are now dying every day from Covid-19 than died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – a rate of nearly 100,000 people per month.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s third National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan calls on the U.S. government to massively scale up Covid-19 testing to 300 million per month for students, teachers, and staff in order to reopen and keep open America’s nearly 100,000 public schools by March. The Plan lays out the largest domestic testing scaleup to date and proposes 14 executive actions for the current and incoming administrations to take in order to rapidly alter the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States. Testing all U.S. public K-12 public schools would cost $42.5 billion, or $8.5 billion per month for the remainder of the school year from February-June 2021.