“Hammer & Dance”: A Framework For Mentally Mapping COVID-19 Projects

tl;dr: Tomas Pueyo’s “Hammer & Dance” framework should be used to drive the public conversation about the timelines, goals, and processes of our collective COVID-19 response efforts. If you’d like to help amplify Hammer & Dance efforts via Twitter, sign up here.

During a dizzying two weeks of navigating COVID-19 WhatsApp threads, I’ve been craving a meta-structure to help see how all this frenzied activity fits together.

I found one recently. It comes, of all places, from a tech employee.

Tomas Pueyo has written two hugely influential pieces since the start of the US crisis: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now and Coronavirus: The Hammer And the Dance. In less than two weeks they’ve garnered ~45 million views and ~310k Medium claps. I expect many of you have read them.

Tomas’ “Hammer & Dance” framework encompasses the broad scope of COVID-19 projects. I think this framework could help clarify the national political dialogue about Coronavirus by creating a clearer sense of timelines, goals, and processes.

Hammer & Dance: The Short Story

The full article is worth the 29 minute read. But here’s a summary:

The situation is bad and getting worse, and our option set is limited:

• Do nothing — Millions of people will likely die.
• Do some things — Slow down the spread, but still have lots of people die.
• Do everything we can NOW (The Hammer) — Stop the virus spreading with lockdown actions over the next 3–7 weeks.

By locking things down, we buy time. We can use that time to:

• Build up testing & tracing capacity — This is the core strategy Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan used to suppress the virus.
• Build up hospital system capacity — Even with the Hammer, we’ll still need to treat a lot of sick people from the first wave before containment started. We need lots of equipment to do that.
• Lower contagiousness — Use drugs and better public health awareness (washing hands properly!) to make the virus less contagious.
• Develop a vaccine — Dramatically lower the number of people who will be infected.

Once we get the initial outbreak under control, but while treatment & vaccine options are still being developed, we Dance:

• Implement proper testing & tracing
• Return life back to mostly normal (as is happening in East Asia)
• Ramp back up social distancing measures if there are flare-ups

Mapping Projects To The Hammer & Dance Framework

Given this framework, we can now make more sense of the various COVID-19 projects. I’ll focus on ones coming out of the tech industry because those are the projects I’m most familiar with. This is certainly only a sliver of the activity that’s happening across many industries.

Phase 1: The Hammer

1.a. Get gov’t to issue lockdown orders across the entire country.

The leading project here CovidActNow.org. This project launched Friday and has since been visited over five million times, reached thousands of state legislators, and is being used as the forecasting platform for a major federal government org. Tomas Pueyo is also running a Hammer & Dance petition drive to encourage federal “shelter-in-place” action.

1.b. Support frontline health workers.

Even if we implement a full national lockdown today, there will still be many sick people who need to be hospitalized. Hospital workers need more supplies. The Coalition of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) pulls these efforts under one umbrella. Among the dozen coalition partners already recruited are Project N95, Operation Masks and Flexport.org.

1.c. Support small businesses & citizens during the Hammer phase

The Hammer is a necessary but costly phase — it effectively shuts down local economies. This severely affects small businesses, workers who are laid off from these businesses, and parents with kids home from school. SupportLocal.co recently merged with USA Today to support a broader set of SMBs. GiveDirectly is giving money directly to US families in need, as well as working with a consortium to push Congress for cash payments to Americans. And School Closures is continuing to build out resources for parents with kids at home.

Phase 2: The Dance

2.a. Scale Testing

To return from lockdown to normalcy, we need much more testing. Curative has developed an at-home, saliva-based test for COVID-19 and has launched in CA in partnership with Carbon Health. Now it’s awaiting EUA approval from the FDA for 50-state distribution & expansion of testing capacity.

2.b. Combining Testing with Tracing

To emulate the East Asian strategy, we need to combine testing with tracing. There is at least one early project ramping up in this space.

2.c. Drugs, Vaccines, and Other Interventions to Tame the Virus

To manage and eventually end the Dance, we’ll need measures to knock down contagiousness, as well as a vaccine. The DCVC portfolio is full of efforts in this space.

Enabling Hammer & Dance

These efforts require financial & human capital. For human resources, there is a meta-doc of all the individual volunteer groups. For financial resources, COVID-19 Response helps get key projects funded.