(Length kind of got away from me on this one—I bolded parts that I think get at the gist for people who don’t want to read everything.)

I know that a lot of businesses are having to close or reduce operations for various reasons (shelter-in-place orders regarding non-essential businesses, or would-be customers exercising caution and not shopping, or having employees fall ill, or having supply chain issues, etc.). I don’t want this question to become a discussion on the merits of the first thing I listed (shelter-in-place orders), because that’s not what I’m asking.

I’m asking: Isn’t there a way for us to be smarter than this virus in how we respond to its effects on our normal operations?

I know that during wars there can be an economic boon as production ramps up on materials and equipment needed for war. (Obviously there is also a profound human cost to wars, but if we’re just focusing on the economic impacts…) Various non-essential everyday goods become scarce as their materials are directed instead towards needed supplies. Production lines are shifted into manufacturing wartime supplies. Propaganda and media encourage those who are able to fill jobs as production increases (even facilitating shifts in deep-rooted cultural notions, such as whether women belonged in the workplace).... And unless I’m mistaken, these shifts are done deliberately and strategically; they are decisions made by people to adjust to the new demands of the temporary normal.

Would it be so hard to have a similar economic shift as we battle a virus? We simultaneously have a dearth of production with the kinds of supplies needed for this kind of war—and doesn’t that mean we have new potential jobs to open up in response to new immediate needs? And meanwhile, we have people out of work because the new demands our temporary normal don’t have a place for those jobs—and doesn’t that mean we have a workforce of people with a wide range of skills that could be tapped?

And I know that the analogy with wartime production starts to fail a bit here, since economic boons with war are usually when the fighting is “elsewhere” (from what I understand), and here the fight is everywhere… but there are ways to protect workers (which different companies are currently implementing to different degrees…), and by producing more PPE, more needed medical equipment, more materials for testing kits, needed technology, etc., it seems like we would in theory be better able to understand and control the spread, thus enabling more normal operations to resume. Shelter-in-place would be one strategy of many, and we could use it with more precision, instead of it being the primary strategy available to us.

But there are clearly reasons this kind of mobilization isn’t happening, because if I’ve thought of it, it’s not a very difficult or clever or original idea. So why isn’t this kind of mobilization happening? Where are the deliberate and strategic decisions to meet the current demands with needed supply?

TL;DR: Why isn’t there more government coordination to shift production and other economic activity to better respond to the current crisis, while simultaneously providing job opportunities to people who have lost their typical job in this atypical time (as there would be during wartime)?

Topics: economics, war, jobs, pandemic, coronavirus, PPE, testing kits, swabs, Rosie the Riveter