You are desperate for a change....I get it.

Slowing the disease requires asking people to isolate themselves and, in most cases, stop working. Most of the world cannot shelter in place for long without income. When people are asked to survive alone—without the cultural, social, and financial inputs that typically keep us alive—new ways of attending to basic needs become immediately necessary. “For people who can’t afford time off work, we absolutely need to come up with out-of-the-box solutions right now,” Ko says.

Among them is the idea that everyone receive cash, immediately. People need to feel able to skip work and still make rent and feed their family. They need cash without strings attached, and they need it now, not via a complex omnibus economic stimulus package next month. With each day that such bills are debated by skeptical senators, people will continue to go into their communities, out of a need to work, spreading the disease simply because they have no other choice.

Planning for emergency cash transfers is underway in Hong Kong, where permanent residents are to receive the equivalent of $1,282 later this year, in an effort to keep both the economy and people alive.* In response to a month of nationwide school closures in Japan, the government is paying out $80 per worker per day to help cover child care or the costs of staying home to parent. Other government payments could be conditional on taking sick leave—a sort of emergency national sick-leave policy, whereby your employer might simply have to verify that you did indeed miss work for two weeks. Or, as with President George W. Bush’s $152 billion economic-stimulus bill in 2008, people could simply get a check in the mail.