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.