Besides this, the world not just the US need standby health personnel in a similar fashion to armies. Soldiers do nothing unless needed, a "health workers" army can do the same.
This being more like a war than business as usual, the correct solution is more like the citizen armies that fought in the world wars, not a standing army.
I for one wish courses in first aid beyond the very basic save-a-life stuff were more widely available.
Here in the UK, there used to be training that anyone could take that was offered by the main first aid organisations, lasted 2-4 days, and covered significantly more serious but not necessarily life-threatening conditions. There were a few variations you could do, including things like common sports injuries, conditions you might encounter while in the wild outdoors and how to handle a situation as well as possible if professional help is going to take a long time to arrive, variations on first aid for children and babies, and so on.
Those courses for the general public seem to have all but disappeared now, presumably due to a lack of demand. This isn’t entirely surprising, as they weren’t cheap to do, but if you did have the means to afford it, what is the value of knowing how to help someone recover better from an injury, or preventing a serious condition from maybe becoming a life-changing one, or in extreme cases even saving a life? My wife and I did take a course specifically on first aid for little ones when we were about to become parents, but even finding that wasn’t easy.
The main ways to get more than very basic first aid training here now seem to be through either statutory obligations for first aiders at work (where the courses are widely available and longer but also have to cover the official paperwork you need to do as a first aider at work) or through becoming a much more serious amateur first aider (either joining one of the first aid organisations and in due course going out to work as a volunteer at major events and the like, or through things like sports coaching organisations that have the scale to make special arrangements for first aid training). That leaves quite a large gap in provision for “ordinary” people who just want to know enough to help out in a serious situation, but as far as I’m aware, there isn’t really anybody trying to fill that gap at the moment. I did ask the trainers on that last course I took if there was anything I’d overlooked in terms of more comprehensive general first aid training, and they said that unfortunately the above is about right at the moment.
I don’t know how much first aid training would really help with the current coronavirus situation anyway. It seems like what is needed in this case is more people with nursing skills and the ability to set up equipment like ventilators. But as a more general point, I would strongly support measures to increase general knowledge of first aid within the population, at least for anyone who is willing and able to help when they can. If nothing else, it might free up more of the fully trained professionals to deal with the most serious situations and so help reduce the strain on them.
The ones that I have done were through BASP [1], the focus was on what was needed for outdoor pursuits but there were people from a wide range of sports, they were not organized by the sporting body itself.
This was one of the things that was lost with the decline of scouting. I remember quite a bit of training between life guard training and first aid training for dealing with common injuries in the wilderness, dealing with shock, etc. Yeah I get the religious associations were a problem but there's no good secular counterpart or places willing to host (as most troops/groups met at churches), the organization is slowly changing but I don't think its the only reason its been in decline.
Just like a reserve army full of reservists has a serious cost (those people all have to spend weekends training, after all: time that could be spent doing other things), a "health care army" would require people to get regular training to stay up-to-date and in practice. Basic first aid can be useful for anyone, but for having people ready to jump in and become healthcare workers in a crisis, they need a lot more than a first aid refresher once a year I think.
You question contains an implication in it that all current other tax spending will not be reduced, and that "pandemic preparedness" will have to be added to the current load.
If this goes really badly in the next couple of weeks or months, that's not going to be a true assumption. A changed nation is going to be looking at its spending priorities and a lot of reassessing will be done. Predicting exactly what the result will be is difficult, but predicting that there could be a lot of change is not.
If we cross the logistic curve's inflection point today, then this may ultimately blow over and be remembered as an inconvenience (and, humans being humans, an overreaction). If this continues on for much longer and kills hundreds of thousands and (based on some of the nasty stuff I've read about) permanently damages the lungs of millions more or other such things, causing disability and long-tail mortality increases for the next 50 years, this will be a generation-defining event comparable to the Great Depression, and the usually-reliable "tomorrow will be mostly like today" prediction methodology will catastrophically break down in the next couple of months.
I guess the implication that the US military and also non discretionary fund won't be reduced based on the last 50 years of data is probably a status quo bet.
given that the US has spent[0] over $5,000,000,000,000 on pointless wars, redirecting even a fraction of that toward a necessary one should be a no-brainer.
We just added "Space Force" so ya, why not add "Health Force" while we're at it. Health Force could have a number of tasks during non-Pandemic times too. We might even be able to pay for Health Force, at least in part, out of some foreign aid budgets if we send Health Force as part of that aid.
Yeah! Some sort of Center who's job it would be to control diseases. We could call it the Center for Disease Control.
Snark aside, we had a similar situation with SARS. In the immediate aftermath, it's easy to say what needs to be done to prevent the next one. It's far harder to get everyone onboard with paying for something 5 or 10 years down the line when "there's no point" and "why do I have to pay taxes"?
Same as "Why we paying for backups?! We never had to use it!"
I'm happy I don't live in The USA right now. Even the worst hits, I don't have to be afraid of medical bills or if I lost my job. Both are covered by the tax I payed before.
I agree, it would make too much sense to have a program of national service where people were required to undergo training for medical emergencies and disaster response. Having practically every able bodied person qualified as a first responder would pay huge dividends.