And if you have a time machine, that's a great solution. Just go back about 7 years and tell them "we'll be needing a lot more medical staff around 2020, get training them, please". It's not really a wonderful solution now, though, due to the very long lead times for training staff.
> the same way that China did in 2020
While China did build more hospitals in 2020, it leaned heavily on redeployment of staff from non-impacted regions, because it was always largely able to keep covid a regional problem. It wasn't just producing new doctors and nurses in a week; they were coming from elsewhere. When covid is endemic, this option doesn't work very well.
Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines.
Costs are largely irrelevant. Perhaps 100 million for such a hospital. This is 0.0001% of the 6+ trillion the government has spent on other covid actions.
It's not going to work if the entire country, continent or planet is in the same situation.
The number of hard to get nurses? Or say - funding for building hospitals that operate on profit? System still and likely seems to perpetually be broken.
Nobody could even get society to do basic pandemic stuff like wear masks or take vaccines. How would they ever coordinate "build more hospitals and train more nurses" ?
Also, what is this "society" you speak of? There are very very few hospital facilities in the USA built as public institutions, or even with (much) public funding. That's now how things work in capitalism.
The answer is pretty simple. You don't need mass coordination to build more hospitals.
It requires 1 person (the president) to agree to build emergency hospitals, or at worst 51% of 535 people in congress.
Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines.
There are less than 1000 covid ICU patients in California today and 12,000 in the entire country. China built a 1000 bed covid hospital in 10 days and staffed it with army nurses.
At worst, it takes 60% of the Senate (because cloture), 218/435 in the House, plus the President to pass the law to do it federally, and then someone invokes the judiciary via lawsuits over federal authorities (“building hospitals is not an enumerated power”).
But if we want to be pedantic, you are assuming a filibuster and controversy.
I think that could be done entirely by executive action, using administrative actions, like 900 billion dollars of other covid spending that had no legislative approval.
I suppose states and governors could sue to have federal hospitals treating their residents torn down in the middle of a pandemic, but that would be terrible PR.
Worse than suing to prevent schools or towns from requiring masks? Worse than suing to prevent "vaccine mandates"?
I'm sure you'll see it differently than I do.
> But if we want to be pedantic, you are assuming a filibuster and controversy.
I don't think you have to assume much to believe that at the present time, not a single Republican senator would vote in favor or such a measure if it was backed by the current president.
Since we're talking about what it takes to force a preferred solution in the absence of consensus, and you specifically said you were targeting the worst case, yes, I’m doing exactly what you called for.