Public health officials and outside experts warned the federal government for years before the coronavirus pandemic that the US was not focusing enough on public health prevention. They were proven right. Now they are again pleading with the federal government to invest more money into preparedness, to take a lesson from Covid-19 about what happens when we don’t prioritize those programs.

But the country is in danger of repeating the same mistakes. Advocates expected a smaller investment in preparedness as part of the forthcoming Build Back Better Act than they believe is necessary. Outside experts have estimated that as much as $75 billion should be spent over 10 years on public health infrastructure, preparedness, and prevention.

The revised Build Back Better legislation totals roughly $10 billion in public health infrastructure and pandemic preparedness funding over the next few years — a down payment on better readiness, in Democrats’ view, but one without assurance of future installations.

“All too often, when there’s a crisis, the reaction is to put money into public health. Once the crisis subsides, the funding tends to dry up,” Ron Bialek, president of the Public Health Foundation, told me. “This is not a recipe for success.”

There is additional funding in the bill to expand the medical workforce, a need experts and hospital leaders also say the pandemic has made impossible to ignore.

It’s difficult to say exactly how the last 18 months could have gone differently if more funding had been spent on preparing. But the country would have likely had more funding for health care workers, more support for disease surveillance and data-sharing systems, and more emphasis on preventing the chronic health conditions that make the virus more deadly.

Read the full article about healthcare infrastructure by Dylan Scott at Vox.