As the world battles the deadly coronavirus, there is a lot we can learn from one of the great pandemics of recent centuries: tuberculosis.

Like the bug that has caused the newest global outbreak, TB is spread through the air. Every exhaled breath by a person with the disease can spread the tuberculosis bacteria to new individuals. TB is thought to have killed 1 billion people between 1800 and 2000. It attacks the human body more slowly than viral diseases like flu or COVID-19, but exacts a great toll. Untreated TB is a death sentence for 80 percent of those who fall ill.

Although TB still kills 4,000 people every day in poor countries, it largely disappeared in wealthy countries after the 1950s through a set of tried and tested strategies — which suggests important lessons for how to stop the newest plague.

Current efforts to battle COVID-19 focus largely on reducing transmission by quarantine and physical distancing and by providing hospital care for the severely ill. But as scientists discovered with TB, the secret is not to put the everyday life of the community on indefinite hold, but rather to make it progressively safer. The focus of stopping transmission and delivering care should not only be on hospitals, but also in the communities where people live and work: their homes, schools and workplaces. Using this approach, wealthy countries turned the airborne scourge of TB from the leading cause of death at the end of the 19th century to a tiny fraction of all infections only 60 years later.

How did public health agencies, municipalities and private partners do it? Aided by a flurry of diagnostic and treatment innovations in the early to mid-20th century, they stopped TB using a community-based strategy called "search, treat and prevent."

First they searched for contacts of known patients. In communities where TB was rampant, they went house-by-house looking for people who had the disease and were transmitting it to others. "Searching" meant giving thousands of people skin tests and chest X-rays, in many cases with mobile vans.

Then they treated the sick — first with food, rest and basic nursing care, and later with medicines. This was done in combination with social and financial support for those who were ill with TB. This freed people from the need to keep working to support themselves and their families, spreading the illness in the process. Finally, starting in the early 1960s, they stopped further spread of the microbe by giving preventive therapy to exposed individuals before they became sick.

In the U.S., all this was made possible through an infusion of resources from national, state and local governments and by voluntary contributions from organizations like the National Tuberculosis Association, as well as employers and labor unions.

The results were stunning: "Search, treat and prevent" helped the U.S. and other wealthy countries stop TB in its tracks. A disease which had been a plague on mankind since the beginning of the modern era was brought to heel in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s — fewer than 20 years.

The lesson for coronavirus? Community-focused mobilization using the "search, treat and prevent" approach could be transformative. Although physical distancing may indeed be necessary in the short term, its economic cost is devastating, particularly for those who cannot work from home or who work in industries that depend on social interaction. The dislocation caused by quarantines — the destruction of social bonds and livelihoods — may in the end be as harmful to health and well-being as the pandemic itself. Moreover, countries relaxing quarantines have seen transmission begin anew from carriers who are not showing symptoms.

So there is much reason to believe that physical distancing and quarantine alone will not stop the epidemic.

The announcement last Friday of a point-of-care test that can accurately diagnose the coronavirus in as little as five minutes is a game-changer. With such technology we can identify hot spots whose residents need to practice physical distancing, provide community-based care to those not sick enough to be in hospitals, and — when preventive medicines, new treatments and vaccines become available — deliver these tools to those who could benefit most.

After a few weeks of physical distancing, this approach would help to identify groups of individuals and even entire communities that could resume their regular economic and social life. Re-entry would require access to masks and other protective equipment for community members — as these items become more available — and more widespread application of tools like indirect UVC lamps in stores and closed work spaces. UVC light has been shown to kill tuberculosis, influenza, coronaviruses and other pathogens that linger in the air and on exposed surfaces in public spaces.

To implement this strategy we would need to give people access to free testing, treatment, medicines and the necessary resources to sustain themselves through any physical distancing. It would be carried out by neighborhood-based teams of professional and lay health workers trained to safely conduct screening, provide basic treatment at home, and give social and economic support to those in isolation. This is exactly what happened after 1963, when a wave of federal funding for the "approach to zero for TB" helped establish community-based health teams in every U.S. state and territory.