To win this war, it must be fought the way the U.S. has fought other wars—as a united nation. The president must lead the fight, and every battle starts with a plan. Here is the best plan I have heard so far, from scientists and business leaders brought together by No Labels, a bipartisan organization that I helped found.

The national goal should be testing every American once a week for four weeks. Those who test positive should quarantine for 10 to 14 days until they are no longer infectious. Americans and others arriving from abroad should be required to submit to the same testing and quarantine. Those who test negative could return to work, send children back to school, eat at restaurants, and attend events. They could do so with the confidence that everyone else at these places had tested negative. By the fall we could be on our way to snuffing out the pandemic in the U.S., saving lives and reopening the economy and society.

There’s a model for this idea. In March, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT converted its lab into a Covid-19 testing facility that can perform 700,000 tests a week and in theory could do five times as many using pooled testing. This facility uses off-the-shelf, interchangeable instruments and supplies. It has a 15-hour turnaround time from receipt of a sample to notification of results, at a cost of $20 to $30 a test. It was converted from an existing lab in two weeks.