What does that even mean?

Congress declares war. Think WWII.

Edit. Thanks to the wonders of HC I can’t reply to you so I have edited this post. The declaration of war is symbolic in one way, but it captures what needs to be done. The entire economy needs to be swung around to getting this pandemic under control as quickly as possible.

Once war is declared we can start conscripting people to do the things that need to be done like enforce curfews, do door to door testing, build hospitals, keep people fed, etc, etc.

We are going to end up at this point anyway, so we might as well do it now and save lives and the economy.

BTW France declared war officially.

Hard to have a war economy when winning the war means shutting your economy down.

So the sarcastic response to that is: What does that even mean?

What I tried and failed to get at in my other comment is that massive resources are already being marshaled to produce more tests and find treatments and find a vaccine and so on. Federal leadership appears to be…poor, but that isn't stopping people from stepping forward.

So when you step past the slogan, what does Congress write in their declaration?

Traditionally it implies sacrifice, on both the individual and collective levels, to achieve a larger goal or to fight an existential threat. But American civilians haven't really been called upon to sacrifice anything in wartime since WWII.

It won't be long before there's no one left alive who remembers mandatory rationing, price and wage controls, and production mandates.

Especially when the people who do are the ones most at risk of dying from the virus. Every day we delay increases those that will die by 40%.