Danielle Allen has this information in Democracy Journal. Here is an excerpt:

When the new coronavirus arrived in the United States in January 2020, it hit an economy, society, and constitutional democracy fundamentally unprepared. As the scale of the challenge became clear, the country simply could not deliver what was needed to confront it. There was a solution, one identified by scholars and policy experts as early as the middle of March and publicly disseminated by the middle of April. That solution was a large-scale program of rapid testing of patients, tracing and testing their contacts, and tracing and testing those individuals’ contacts in turn. Such testing also needed reinforcement from a culture of adherence to universal precautions such as mask-wearing, hand and bathroom hygiene, and robust practices of infection control. But the country did not have the relevant infrastructure ready to go and was not able to deliver this mobilization.

The near-term challenge of January 2020 was identical to our long-term challenge: how to achieve pandemic resilience—the ability of our social and political institutions to process a major exogenous shock yet keep all essential functions operating, while simultaneously protecting lives, livelihoods, and liberties. The urgency of the crisis meant that we needed to deliver the durable infrastructure of resilience in the form of emergency response. But the near-term nature of the crisis situation by no means required that the response to it should consist only of transient initiatives. Emergencies have always provided opportunities for durable innovation.

Look back to antiquity. The Romans’ Appian Way, their first major road, was built in 312 BCE as a supply line during the Second Samnite War. A crisis response yielded durable infrastructure. Of course, the same kind of thing happened with penicillin and nuclear power during World War II. For the purposes of our current situation, the effort to find a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 is another good example of an emergency yielding a permanent advance. We could have and should have done the same with the infrastructure of public health.

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