What is missing in such mandatory “stick” approaches is the more active use of “carrot” incentives that could both encourage self-isolation and help prepare a workforce to bounce back in the recovery phase. Noncompliance during a quarantine has large social costs, not least a faster spread of the pandemic and higher death rates. But governments could subsidize activities that help to better align private incentives with social objectives, and, in so doing, provide new forms of social protection that also make social distancing more bearable. What are some activities that could be performed by many citizens without leaving their homes?

Another high-potential area is document digitization: Only 10 percent of the world’s books are digitized. Even with the current level of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, for a book to be digitized, an independent person needs to check it for errors, problems with tables and images, tagging, and oversee the look of the resulting text. Handwritten documents, images, and tables, even in printed books, require manual processing, proofreading, careful checking, and quality control. A person would receive scanned images of, let’s say, old letters to decipher and type into the electronic document. Comparing the results of several independent people working on the same document would assure the quality of transcription. The Rainfall Rescue Project of the U.K.’s Met Office aims to digitize 65,000 pieces of paper that contain monthly and decadal rainfall totals at thousands of weather stations across the U.K. from 1950 back to 1820. Because of their public-good nature, such projects are underfinanced. The global research community and libraries around the world would benefit from government support of these efforts. And many people could earn income and be kept occupied at home, inputting historical climatic data in spreadsheets.