Singapore, April 2 -- If you fast for two months, you will lose weight, but you will almost certainly die. Similarly, a two-month lockdown might suppress the coronavirus, but it threatens to kill the economy. The lockdown is pushing hundreds of millions of people globally into unemployment and poverty. But, like the starving dieter whose weight shoots up once he starts eating, letting everyone rush back to work could restart the epidemic as those still carrying the virus refuel another cycle of infection. If this leads to new lockdowns - a sort pf "yoyo" effect - when the dust settles, more people will have died of hunger than of the coronavirus.

Prof. Uri Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his graduate students Omer Karin and...