This isn't the first time the world has needed lots of new COBOL programmers to burst on a single project. I'd suggest the same solution as last time: pay people $500-$1,000 per hour on short term contracts to do so.
Assuming the 're-written' version isn't similarly out of date by that point in time, the real solution is for business/government to finally understand that if your org depends on software then it's infrastructure that requires constant maintenance and scheduled replacement.
Getting them to understand that is an exercise for the reader.
Because it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. I did a year in a Cobol shop as a graduate developer at a large financial corporation. Working on a mainframe was the most fun I had on that job. And why not? You're logging on to a gigantic computer with millions of users and billions of transactions daily, with a text-based user interface that looks like it was designed by Tarn Adams. And I say that 100% as a compliment.
Seen another way, the "antiquated Cobol stack" is like a deep dive into the history of computer science and programming languages. You can see with your own eyes how stuff used to be done 50 years ago. And there is so much to learn. It's not just Cobol: there's a whole bunch of other languages like Rexx for example that is like javascript on a mainframe, or like, well, JCL which is an absolute horror to behold of course. There's a whole new operating system to learn, or three and there's a whole new computer architecture to become familiar with. How is that not absolute programmer heaven?
I mean, seriously, when I first got all the permissions and so on that I needed to work on a mainframe, I was giggling to myself like a little girl. "Really? They gave me access to all this?". It was like someone had given me the keys to the playground.
The job sure got a bit boring after a while, which is the reason I left, but for a few months it was just sheer tomfoolery, poking at things and finding how things worked.
>> The real solution is to think long term and rewrite all of these antiquated systems so that the next time there is an emergency it will be much simpler to find qualified developers.
That is not a sustainable solution. Fifty years from now people will be making jokes about "that antiquated Python stack" and state agencies will be ringing alarm bells for the lack of experienced young Python programmers. You can't just keep throwing out all the old code and replacing it with whatever new language is cool right now.
I wonder how many people realise Python is more than 30 years old already.
There's also the context of more money in a time when the fed prints trillions of dollars every week. This will be a drop in the bucket, and in an environment where governments have decided to spend their way out of the problem.
The ONLY reason that social distancing is an effective option is because so much is possible online and that all that infrastructure is good enough to handle the surge in traffic that they are currently experiencing. Imagine an alternate world in which these services were not as competent.
I also think that, precisely because of that, social distancing will only slow the rate of exponential growth, not prevent it.
Which is to say that these are organizations that have been sitting on this problem for thirty or more years, doing nothing about it, and suddenly they cannot handle the load due to THEIR greed, apathy, and incompetence. But programmers are meant to queue up and work for free in order to fix it because it is now a "crisis" of their intentional making.
This is an argument for private profits, subsidies the loses. How about no? How about we eat into these organization's balance sheets in order to fix the massive financial and technical debt they let build up, because frankly they deserve it and it is the only way they'll learn. Any other solution will just excuse them to do this again.
Why should programmers bare the cost of their mistakes while they seemingly get a free ride/keep the "good year" windfall? It is immoral for programmers to profit, but not for these organizations that created these problems out of their greed? Nope.
Yes, it might be nice to have voters with more foresight and long term horizons who don't mind paying higher taxes. But lets not blame some nameless profit centered corporation.
Someone needs to decide whether Cobol is going to live or die. If it is going to live then people have to stop pretending that it is not there, create proper training courses for it and recruit people to maintain and develop the systems properly. And of course the requirements should be reviewed and updated to include the capacity to cope with the volume of work that is being experienced by these systems.
Of course this won't happen because as soon as the crisis is past all those USD 1000 per hour people will be laid off, the employers will breath a sigh of relief that it is all over and go back to their old ways.