Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

Once COVID struck, demand surged. For one ninety-day stretch in the spring of 2020, we used about 140 million N95 respirators.34 In March, some US hospitals were using 1,700 percent more N95 respirators, 500 percent more isolation gowns, 860 percent more face masks, and 300 percent more surgical masks, according to one estimate.35 A lot of money was spent trying to quickly establish domestic manufacturing of all these items. In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, $1 billion was set aside for this effort. But the lingering question is how to maintain this excess capacity once the pandemic is over. In past crises, or in preparation for them, we built the domestic capacities we thought we’d need, only to see them atrophy once the crises failed to arrive, and attention shifted elsewhere. This was the case with our preparations in the early 2000s for a feared pandemic involving a bird flu. The need for the domestic manufacture of critical supplies, and the need for policy approaches that provide for sustained capacities, will be a recurring theme in how we prepare for the next pandemic.