New book highlights need for rapid, frequent screening to control the pandemic Covid-19 is a global pandemic inflicting large health and economic costs. In his previous book, The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (The MIT Press, 2020), economist Joshua Gans explains that those costs have been so large because governments and others have lacked the information needed to control the pandemic. Unless we know who is infectious, we can't break the chains of transmission, which results in the escalation of our problems. Pandemics, he writes, are information problems. Related Stories Now, in a follow-up book, The Pandemic Information Solution (Endeavor Literary Press, 2021), Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, outlines the solution to the information gap. By engaging in rapid, frequent screening, we can control the pandemic and restore normality. We can lower the number of cases, break chains of transmission, and make it safe for people to interact again.