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(CNN) – President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris say they will take the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic in a dramatically different direction.
“The pandemic is becoming significantly more worrisome across the country,” Biden said Friday. “I want everyone to know from day one that we are going to implement our plan to control this virus.”
There were a huge number of new cases last week, and by the time Biden takes office on January 20, the influential model from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects there will be more than 372,000 deaths from Covid- 19, that is, 135,000 more than the current total.
“By the time the Biden-Harris administration takes over, this virus will have run rampant through American communities,” Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, told CNN Sunday.
While the administration of President Donald Trump touted ending the pandemic as one of its accomplishments, Biden has laid out a plan for the pandemic on his campaign website and it is now repeated on the Biden-Harris transition website posted on Sunday.
Biden’s transition team announced Monday to the members of its coronavirus advisory board, which will be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University. Other members are Dr. Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Dr. Atul Gawande, Dr. Celine Gounder, Dr. Julie Morita, Michael Osterholm, Loyce Pace, Dr. Robert Rodríguez and Dr. Eric Goosby.
That doesn’t mean that Trump’s White House coronavirus task force turns off the lights.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, said Sunday on CNN that it is vitally important that the respective Trump and Biden task forces on the coronavirus work together.
“First of all, I think we should demand cooperation,” Jha said.
Here are five ways Biden says the response to the US coronavirus will change when he is president.
More testing and contact tracing
Number one on Biden’s list of promises is more testing and contact tracing.
Testing has increased dramatically since the early days of the pandemic, but scientists say the nation needs tens of millions of tests per day to keep the country safely open, and even 10 months after the pandemic, there is still no enough.
Without the tests, scientists cannot have a clear idea of where the virus is spreading. Since up to 40% of Covid-19 cases are estimated to be asymptomatic, a quick test result is key to stopping the spread of the disease. And research has found that around 75% of infected contacts must be quarantined to stop the spread.
Biden promises that all Americans will have access to “regular, reliable, and free testing.”
They say they will double down on shortcut test sites, invest in new technology and create a US Public Health Jobs Corps that would mobilize “at least 100,000” culturally competent contact trackers.
Biden says he would also borrow a page from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and create something akin to the War Production Board, which helped oversee the conversion of peacetime factories into plants that made military equipment and weapons. A Pandemic Testing Board, Biden says, would help produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.
Additional investment in vaccines and treatments
Since March, the Trump administration has spent billions to develop and scale up Covid-19 vaccines and treatments through Operation Warp Speed. Its goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines by January 2021. Several potential vaccines are in large-scale trials.
States submitted their vaccine distribution plans to the CDC weeks ago. But they have not received funds from Congress to begin building the infrastructure they will need to distribute those vaccines to tens of millions of people.
Biden promises to invest an additional $ 25 billion to manufacture and distribute vaccines to everyone in the US for free.
They say that the policy will not influence the approval of a vaccine and that the new administration will make the clinical data of any approved vaccine publicly available.
The Biden campaign also promised that the therapies and drugs would be affordable.
Mandatory masks and more PPE
Biden has said he would work with local governors and mayors to demand masks in public. An October modeling study showed that if 95% of Americans wore masks, more than 100,000 lives could be saved with Covid-19.
Biden’s team also says it will address issues with personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.
Several studies have shown that there has been a severe shortage of personal protective equipment since early 2020, and some shortages have gotten worse, according to a September analysis by the American Hospital Association.
Often times, nursing home and medical staff have had to reuse gloves, masks and other protective equipment at their own risk. The union, National Nurses United, estimates that more than 1,700 healthcare workers have died in the pandemic. Between March and May, 6% of all hospitalized Covid-19 patients were healthcare personnel, according to an October CDC report.
While the Trump administration has claimed to use the Defense Production Act to increase PPE production, a nonpartisan analysis in September found that it has rarely done so.
Biden said he would use that power to make sure domestic supply stocks are fully replenished. He also promised to help create American-sourced products so that the United States is not dependent on other countries.
In addition to encouraging Congress to pass an emergency package to help schools pay for supplies for the pandemic, the Biden administration would create a “reset package” to help small businesses pay for protective equipment and Plexiglass. .
A push for ‘clear, consistent and evidence-based guidance’
The Biden administration also says it would encourage CDC to take a more active role by providing specific guidance to communities on when to close. Trump’s critics say the agency has been sidelined in favor of reopening the economy.
Biden’s team says it would create a National Pandemic Dashboard so that people could measure for themselves, in real time, how much disease is in their zip code. That level of data has been hard to find.
Biden would also create a Covid-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force that would become a permanent Post-Pandemic Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force that would address issues with disparities in the public health system. Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities have had significantly higher rates of infection and hospitalization.
Rejoin WHO and look for future threats
The Trump administration formally began the process of leaving the World Health Organization in July. Biden says he would restore America’s relationship with the WHO.
The Biden administration also says it plans to expand the ranks of CDC supervisors, so its disease detectives can spot future threats. The Trump administration had cut some of those jobs, including in the China office.
During the Trump administration, PREDICT, the pathogen-tracking program that looks for future threats from diseases like the coronavirus, ended. Biden said he would launch it again.
Biden also said he would reestablish the White House National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which the Trump administration had incorporated into another organization in 2018. It had been created by the Obama administration in 2016 to help handle threats such as ebola.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “How Biden Plans to Change America’s Response to the Pandemic.”
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