Here ’s What Joe Biden Can Do About the COVID-19 Pandemic Starting On His First Day as U.S. President

Every pandemic starts as a squall—a localized disturbance in a single city or town, causing all manner of problems there, but sparing the larger world outside. Squalls become storms, however, and storms become tempests and before long the entire world is being lashed by winds of disease and death that no one saw coming just a few months before. As President Joe Biden takes office, he is facing nothing short of a pathogenic typhoon, with COVID-19 raging around the world, nowhere more so than in the U.S., with some 24 million cases and 400,000 deaths—more than 20% of the global toll. If the pandemic unfolded in stages so too must it be contained that way. During the campaign, Biden promised swift action on such steps as testing, vaccine manufacture and distribution, and preventive measures like mask mandates. That, he’s said, will be followed by other steps like improving surveillance of emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, extending unemployment benefits to people whose jobs were lost as a result of quarantining and lockdowns, extending the moratorium on evictions, and ensuring that people who contract COVID-19 and survive don’t face discrimination in insurance benefits. It would, the candidate promised, be nothing short of a stepwise, war-like mobilization. Less than a week before his inauguration, Biden unveiled a massive $1.9 trillion plan, proposing short-term, medium-term and long-term fixes intended to bring the current rate of infection and death un...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news