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The US will need to scale up to 20 million coronavirus tests per day by mid-summer in order to safely lift lockdowns, according to a Harvard panel of experts in health, science and economics.

The new report released from Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics said that an approach that gradually ramps up testing will protect the economy from “cycles of opening up and shutting down.”

“It allows us to steadily reopen the parts of the economy that have been shut down, protect our frontline workers, and contain the virus to levels where it can be effectively managed and treated until we can find a vaccine,” the authors wrote in the “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience” report.

Testing capacity should be at between 500,000 and 700,000 tests by mid-May to begin the reopening process, the group said.

Then by early June, that number will have to increase to conducting five million tests daily, the report said.

The testing capacity should increase until it reaches 20 million per day by mid-summer in order to “remobilize the economy” and regain some sense of normalcy.

So far, the US has only performed a little over 4.1 million coronavirus tests in total, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

Even so, the Harvard researchers warned that the 20 million daily target may still not be enough to stop the spread of the virus.

“We acknowledge that even this number may not be high enough to protect public health,” the group said. “In that considerably less likely eventuality, we will need to scale-up testing much further.”

But the experts added that by mid-summer, the country “should be in a better position to know how to do it.”

In addition to testing, the report also suggests there needs to be a combination of contact tracing and measures to isolate those who are infected.

“We can have bottom-up innovation and participation and top-down direction and protection at the same time; that is what our federal system is designed for,” it said.