The times require all qualified hands on deck.

Put a temporary ban on coronavirus malpractice suits.

In the United States and most other countries, anyone who helps out in a roadside accident, earthquake or similar medical crisis is protected from subsequent legal second-guessing by good Samaritan laws. Without such laws, doctors fearing a medical malpractice suit might fail to help.

The same principle should be applied throughout the Covid-19 crisis. Many difficult decisions will have to be made regarding who receives treatment and by whom. Medical workers are already volunteering for hazardous duty; why expose them and their employers to the additional risk of a lawsuit?

To accelerate innovation, suspend patents.

A hospital in Brescia, Italy, had an urgent need for valves necessary to hook up a patient to a ventilator. An enterprising start-up figured out a way to produce the valves with a 3-D printer and made 100 of them in a day, which it donated to the local hospital. Ten patients were treated immediately.

That raw creativity was rewarded with the threat of a lawsuit by the owner of the patent on these valves even though they had been unable to supply them.

Suppliers that cannot meet the demand for their product, be it ventilators, masks or gowns, do not lose any money if others figure out ways to jump in and temporarily fill the gap. Let’s not punish creative heroes.

Patents should be briefly suspended for the production of anything deemed necessary to fight this virus. Each country — including the United States — should look into suspending their patents globally. After the crisis is over, intellectual property rights can be restored, and any firm that decides to stay in the industry should then be required to start paying normal patent license fees. Those Italian valve innovators said they had no intention of continuing in that business. They were just trying to help.

Take a deep breath on privacy worries.

The strict “stay-in-place” rules that have been adopted around the world are imposing enormous economic and emotional costs. It is essential that we fight the spread of the virus as quickly as possible. Tragically, this process been severely handicapped by a shortage of tests in many places, including much of the United States. Now that testing is beginning at scale, a crucial step to speed the fight is to identify the network of people who have had contact with those who newly tested positive.