Both doctors and lawyers will be needed by the world in the coming months.

Stay Home. Limit Travel. Retreat into your innermost sanctum and treat yourself like a loaded gun. Don't cough. Don't touch. Don't sneeze. Shelter in place.

For lawyers, accustomed to being able to solve problems large and small on a daily basis, the coronavirus crisis is particularly frustrating.

There is every reason to salute the practicing doctors, nurses and scientists on the front lines. Their work deserves the legal community's heartfelt support.

And now, in less obvious ways, the task of countering COVID-19′s slow hurricane will fall to lawyers, statesmen, governors and ethics experts. Lawyers have reason to welcome the opportunity to lend their talents.

The late Connecticut Supreme Court Justice T. Clark Hull expressed it well.

Hull viewed the law as a noble, learned profession. He admitted he didn't like it when his doctor friends chided him about notorious, errant lawyers.

"Let's not be ashamed of being lawyers and judges and politicians," Hull declared. He told those doctors, "When your predecessors were putting leeches on George Washington, my predecessors were drafting the Constitution of the United States."

When it comes to identifying pathogens, lawyers, statesmen and philosophers had a vast head start. From the days of Aristotle and Plato, identifying the characteristics of dangerous and harmful humans was a front-burner objective—being perfected, hit or miss, even by cavemen.

But the "bad guys" that doctors fight were invisible to the naked eye.

Before the invention of the microscope and discovery of germs, doctors and scientists were basically in the dark about disease. They couldn't really explain why food went bad, let alone human beings.

Yet, even in the candle-lit era of parchment and quill pens, the founding fathers realized that government corruption was inevitable without checks and balances. Among the various states, differing solutions have been fashioned by courts and legislatures—individual laboratories of social policy and governing.

In the other laboratories, those of drug companies and universities, they are racing hard. The longer race is to discover a vaccine. The shorter race—terribly important to the economy and the stability of society—is for a rapid at-home test for Covid-19 antibodies.

That kind of blood-drop test—approved in other countries—would fill a huge hole in America's scientific understanding, identifying who has already contracted the disease and developed some natural immunity. Because a large proportion of those infected showed few or no symptoms, this plague is very poorly mapped.

More data is needed to track the spread of the disease and to blunt its force.

Indeed, once identified, thousands of COVID survivors might be able to donate antibody plasma to the stricken, saving lives even before the vaccine is available. This certainly presents hope.

The top doctors overseeing the laboratories will make their best choices among the options. If the testing kits and vaccines are delivered with scrupulous fairness, it could be a proud hour for this democratic republic. That's where the law and the learning of lawyers comes in. Our national leaders need to choose among the state "social policy" laboratories and nationalize the practices that are actually stopping the spread.

Lawyers, judges, lawmakers—you know the medical doctors and scientists can't accomplish this alone.