From the moment the world went into pandemic lockdown officials have struggled to stay on top of the fast-moving crisis, both in terms of halting the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing and lockdown measures, as well as understanding and mitigating the severe shock to the economy and peoples’ lives. With governments, businesses and health experts flying blind, timely data has never been more vital.

As it turns out, one surprising solution may come down to our fat fingers.

In every economic crisis over the last century, people have ultimately turned to the world of medicine to help make sense of the fear and uncertainty around them. In the 1930s, political cartoons showed U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt as a doctor tending to an ailing Uncle Sam, whose bandages carried words like “banking” and “depression.” When the 1990s currency crisis in southeast Asia threatened to infect the rest of the world and trigger a global meltdown, economists and investors took to calling it the “Asian flu.” And in 2008, as America’s economy was felled by the financial crisis, then president Barack Obama urged lawmakers to “provide a blood infusion” to “make sure that the patient is stabilized.”

Never has the metaphor of an economy on life support been more appropriate than for the twin health and economic crises the entire world now faces. Canada, like nearly every other nation on the planet, has put its economy into an induced coma as it attempts to fight off the invading COVID-19 virus. Offices, factories, stores and restaurants are closed and workers have been ordered to stay home, many without paycheques, some unsure whether their jobs will still exist when the crisis abates.

It’s become an all-too familiar image from the coronavirus scare of 2020—aisles of empty store shelves bereft of products like hand sanitizer, cans of soup and face masks. Oh yes, and toilet paper.

It’s that last item that has struck many as most puzzling. The symptoms of Covid-19, a respiratory illness, don’t suggest a need for vast quantities of toilet paper, while toilet paper manufacturers themselves say there have been no disruptions to their supply chains. So why has panicked buying and hoarding been so widespread, not just in Canada but in every country impacted by the virus?

Put simply, our human brains.

Most of the world’s central banks have responded by slashing interest rates. Last week the Bank of Canada joined them with a 50 basis point cut. But while more rate cuts are expected, the ability of central banks to tackle this particularly type of crisis — supply chains have been crippled and consumers are increasingly afraid of simply going out to spend — is seen as limited. “With interest rates already so low to begin with you’re just pushing on a string with rate cuts,” says Kevin Milligan, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia. “It takes months for investment patterns to change, and that doesn’t help when something is hitting you in the short run.”

Which is why a growing chorus of economists and investors are calling on Finance Minister Bill Morneau to roll out a fiscal stimulus plan, spending heavily to shore up Canada’s economy. Morneau was already set to release the Liberals’ first re-election budget, likely at the end of March. On Monday he acknowledged Canada was in a “very volatile position” and said the federal government has the “capacity to deal with challenges exactly like this” and will introduce measures this week.

But what should those stimulus efforts look like? Maclean’s spoke with four economy watchers about what a fiscal plan for Canada’s battered economy should entail.