BIDEN UNVEILS A SOLID COVID-19 RELIEF PLAN

Kudos to President-elect Biden, who on Thursday evening formally introduced his $1.9 trillion coronavirus and downturn relief plan.

Dubbed the American Rescue Plan, it includes beefed-up stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment aid, an eviction moratorium and more assistance for small businesses, states and schools. It also calls for a a paid sick-leave program to encourage people to stay home when they’re ill, as well as a minimum wage increase and a jobs-building infrastructure effort — all in keeping with his pandemic-based “Build Back Better” agenda.

“It’s not hard to see that we are in the middle of a once-in-several generations economic crisis within a once-in-several generations public health crisis,” Biden said. “There is no time to wait. We have to act and act now. This is what the economists are telling us.”

It is also what those experts told a seemingly deafened Trump administration and GOP. Republican lawmakers especially refused to hear it and now we have roughly 4,000 deaths from COVID-19 each day as 23.3 million Americans have been confirmed to have contracted the virus since March. As of Friday morning, more than 388,000 Americans had died.

Biden plans, if Congress approves it, to invest $1 trillion in direct aid; $400 billion in a national vaccination program and related health policies to stem the pandemic, including $130 billion for schools; $400 billion for community support, and $10 billion to support information technology to modernize federal cybersecurity infrastructure.

These are needed fixes, especially given the Trump administration’s slow, state-entrusted bureaucratic rollout of the vaccines. It is imperative that we expand testing and contact tracing, as well as launch community vaccination centers free of charge for vaccine recipients.

Biden also would spend $170 billion preparing K-12 schools and institutions of higher learning to reopen (or reopen again) safely within the administration’s first 100 days.

These two policies in particular get at our most pressing priorities: ending the pandemic and safely reopening schools and daycares so moms and dads can go back to work and resuscitate the economy.

Clearly there can be no rebuild of the economy until we beat back the virus enough for those other things to happen.

Sure, some and perhaps many GOP congress members and senators will decry the price tag, especially as it also includes raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

But it’s important to remember that many of those same GOP folks resisted Democratic calls for more than $2 trillion in relief for months leading up to the November election.

And let’s be sure to remind them — day after day — that in 2017 they passed a $2 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which should have been named Tax Cuts For The Rich Act.

Let’s see, how many jobs did that create? Well, corporations and the richest Americans in 2020 saw record profits, but unemployment figures reported by the Labor Department on Thursday showed that 1.15 million Americans filed new unemployment claims in the first full week of the year, a 25% increase from the previous week. Another 284,000 claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, an emergency federal program for workers like freelancers who do not normally qualify for jobless benefits. Altogether, our nation shed 140,000 jobs in December — on top of the job losses earlier in the year.

Here in Hamilton County, our mask mandate has just been extended, our officials are hoping to get more COVID-19 vaccines next week in time for residents who’ve gotten their initial shots to get their second dose. Thousands of people over 75 were turned away for their first shots in recent weeks as we ran out of doses, and the county hasn’t conducted any vaccination days in more than a week.

All that said, county health officials said they will not immediately expand vaccine eligibility to people 65 and older, as the CDC has recently recommended.

In a county of 367,804 people (as of 2019), the health department has received 6,575 vaccine doses and given out 6,476 doses. Meanwhile, we continue to be a hotspot in the region in a state that continues to be hotspot in the nation.

Tennessee isn’t the only state frustrated with the vaccines rollout. Georgia, too, is facing challenges.

Whitfield County — facing one of the state’s worst COVID outbreaks when President Trump visited Dalton on the eve of Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoff elections — now is seeing still higher spikes of illness after a superspreader event in which thousands of supporters swarmed the Dalton Municipal Airport to see the president.

And get this: The Whitfield County Commission on Monday repealed its less-than-a-month-old mandate requiring masks be worn in county buildings. Why? The conservative commissioners don’t like them, don’t think they work, don’t think “constituents” like them and believe they are unenforceable. There is not a state mask mandate in Georgia, just as there is not a state mandate in Tennessee.

As the four Whitfield commissioners voted, there was an empty chair between two of them. It was the chair where a fifth commissioner would be seated had he not died of COVID-19 in November.

Clearly we need federal government help. But we also need our own common-sense help. Masks do work. And we will continue to need them even as vaccines do finally reach us.