One of us (Julie) is an AI researcher and a roboticist at MIT. The other (Neel) is a physician at a major hospital and a public health researcher at Harvard. Our dinnertime conversations tend to focus on the future. Lately, unsurprisingly, they’ve become hushed and grim.

Amid the daily news churn, policy makers seem to be facing an impossible choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods. A close study of cautionary tales and hopeful examples from across the globe makes clear that social distancing, sheltering in place, and other mitigation efforts are critical to blunting the impact of the pandemic, despite the havoc they wreak on daily routines and markets. However, we know that the sooner we can return to safely congregating, the better.

How can we get there? We believe the answer lies in computation. We need to put as much data and computing power into the problem as we can, and now. Here’s a hopeful scenario we’ve discussed, one we believe could, with focused effort, be operational by summer.

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