PANDEMIC PROGNOSIS
Biden has ambitious plans to curb the coronavirus, the country’s worst crisis in many years. But they could face big hurdles in a divided country with a divided Congress.
President- elect Joe Biden made his election bid a referendum on President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But as he inherits the worst crisis since the Great Depression — a raging pandemic on top of a teetering economy — his plans to turn that around are set to collide with new political realities.
The closeness of the results underscore voters’ deep divisions about how they think the virus should be handled. And depending on the outcome of two Senate runoff elections, it is possible Biden will have to navigate a Republican- controlled Senate disinclined to support a greater federal role in testing and contact tracing, among other responsibilities now left mostly to the states.
“It’s going to be very challenging for Biden to implement some of the ambitious pandemic preparedness and response plans he has,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Time is not on his side either, as the country surpassed 128,000 cases on Friday, setting a record for the third straight day, and more than 1,000 people a day are dying — a toll that is expected to grow in coming weeks as the weather turns colder and many Americans retreat indoors.
Projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington suggest the worst stretch of the pandemic is likely to hit in mid- to late January, just around the time Biden would take office.
Biden is expected to announce a coronavirus task force Monday, signaling that the virus is his top and immediate priority, according to two people familiar with the plans, who also cautioned that the timing could change and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. Among its co- chairs are Vivek Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration, and David Kessler,
Food and Drug Administration commissioner under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Both have briefed Biden on the pandemic for months.
The surge is expected to continue unless Trump undertakes aggressive new measures against the virus in his final two months — a prospect considered unlikely since he has repeatedly claimed the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic, even as cases and hospitalizations climbed.
Even before the race was officially called Saturday, Biden made clear in a speech Friday night that addressing the public health and economic crises would be his top priority.
“I want everyone to know on day one, we’re going to put our plan to control this virus into action. We can’t save any of the lives lost — any of those that have been lost — but we can save a lot of lives in the months ahead,” Biden said.
Biden has laid out a far more muscular federal approach than Trump, saying he would urge state and local leaders to implement mask mandates if needed, create a panel on the model of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board to scale up testing and lay out detailed plans to distribute vaccines to 330 million people after they are greenlighted as safe and effective.
He has also talked about unifying the country and restoring public trust in the federal government’s message.
He plans to launch some of those efforts immediately, calling Republican and Democratic governors during the transition to urge them to adopt mask mandates and to communicate the importance of social distancing to their constituents, according to three Biden advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about these matters.
Biden’s goal, these people say, is to have people hear the same message from leaders at all levels of government and from members of both parties — something that has been lacking this past year as mask- wearing became a political flash point.