The coronavirus crisis is a stark reminder of the grave costs of infrastructure neglect — in this case, neglect of our public health infrastructure.

Decades of hard-earned experience — with SARS in 2002, H1N1 in 2009, and Ebola in 2014 — gave us a roadmap for international and domestic rapid response systems to identify and isolate outbreaks before they could cause catastrophic damage.

Properly funding pandemic preparedness infrastructure might have cost us a few billion dollars. Instead, our lack of preparedness has cost the U.S. economy over $12 trillion in market value, $2 trillion in taxpayer-funded stimulus and bailouts (and counting), threatened the health of hundreds of millions of Americans, and plunged the world economy into a what could be a global depression.

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