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The United States government is not doing nearly enough to handle the coronavirus pandemic. While containment methods have been sharply increased through the implementation of social distancing, the effective reduction of traffic in public spaces, and the closure of nonessential businesses, the rate of infected persons will likely increase exponentially in the days to come. What’s more, with too few staffed hospital beds, even with a highly effective containment strategy many will die from lack of treatment as health care facilities become flooded those in need of urgent attention. And while Congress scrambles to deal with the economic fallout of the crisis many of the existing policy ideas are essentially variations on a fundamentally defensive theme: tax rebates, tax cuts, relief checks, paid sick leave. We can surely slow the spread of the virus through these policies, that is, we can buy time. Yet to really solve the crisis we need aggressive government action that goes beyond epidemiologic or economic containment. We need economic planning and a wartime-like mobilization of existing resources, personnel, and infrastructure.

Expand Coverage Firstly, we need an emergency Medicare expansion to cover the costs for treatment and testing for all citizens. It’s clear that government health care has been far more effective at handling the crisis than patchwork systems, with South Korea as the world’s leading example. While all countries are using the strong containment methods employed in the United States, those with integrated health care systems and universal coverage are better able to quickly steer their health systems in the direction of treatment and testing. With a single system, countries are able to aggressively test, treat, and trace cases while slowing the spread of the disease. But slowing the spread is only effective insofar as we can treat cases effectively and this means we need to greatly expand the state’s capacity to handle infected patients.

Expand Capacity Expanding capacity would require a massive expansion of medically staffed beds for the sick with the goal of ensuring that the elderly and those who are seriously ill are able to receive critical care. New York governor Andrew Cuomo rightly argued for the use of the Army Corps of Engineers to build new facilities but the conversion of existing public schools, which are currently sitting empty, into care centers for those with mild cases could provide a major expansion of staffed beds. Of course, next we would need to figure out how to staff those beds. Luckily, we have the best funded and most highly organized pool of potential care center workers anywhere in the world: the United States Armed Forces. The rapid expansion of frontline medical personnel requires that we train soldiers (alongside volunteers) in frontline medical treatment to be deployed throughout the country but especially in hot spots to help triage with local medical staff. Only the military has the ability to move thousands of people across the continent to meet urgent needs, and it’s a far better use of their resources than anything else they could be doing right now. In a matter of weeks the Public Health Service working in coordination with nurses unions and physicians associations could train thousands to become “mild care” front-line medics — for those who are in too severe of condition to be trusted with self-quarantines but in too mild of condition to justify ICU.

Expand Production and Distribution Now even if we were able to expand health coverage and hospital bed capacity we still have one major obstacle: the production and distribution of needed medical supplies. Right now — some forty-four days out from the projected peak of the crisis — we are falling well short of producing enough supplies to properly test and treat the disease caused by coronavirus. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy requested over 2 million respirators but received only 84,578. Here is where the greatest level of economic planning for the production and distribution of goods will be needed. The government must sequester — or at least commandeer the management of — existing manufacturing plants in order to rapidly expand the production of N95 masks, portable respirators, medical gowns and gloves, protective face-shields, and of course, antiviral medicines and other pharmacological products needed to treat the disease. Further, the government must use its existing distribution system, the United States Postal Service, to distribute these materials to needed facilities and hot-spots on command. Given the rapid spread of the virus the capacity to treat it will be greatly diminished without a massive coordinated effort across public and private institutions. Yet in a country with well-funded and highly organized permanent armed services, and with existing public infrastructure available for conversion in every zip code, the crisis could be contained and the toll on most Americans could be seriously lessened. But this all supposes the political will (and skill) is available and to make that happen.