Simultaneous packing and covering in sequence spaces

We adapt a construction of Klee (1981) to find a packing of unit balls in $\ell_p$ ($1\leq p<\infty$) which is efficient in the sense that enlarging the radius of each ball to any $R>2^{1-1/p}$ covers the whole space. We show that the value $2^{1-1/p}$ is optimal.
Comment: 5 pages