A nationally coordinated approach like the one Biden proposed during the campaign, “will make a world of difference,” said Amesh Adalja, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security who spoke to reporters ahead of the election.
Biden’s seven-point plan essentially flips the US coronavirus response from Trump’s state-led one to a central federal effort. It calls for doubling drive-thru testing nationwide, using wartime powers to manufacture enough medical equipment for vulnerable people, and injecting another $25 billion into manufacturing and distributing vaccines. It also calls for implementing a nationwide mask mandate that could save about 70,000 lives and establishing a public health corps that would employ 100,000 Americans as contact tracers. He has said he’ll return the federal response to one driven by scientists — quickly naming cabinet officials for federal agencies central to the pandemic response as well as a 12-person coronavirus task force…
“The country is behind the eight ball right now because everything has been so messed up,” said Nicole Lurie, a former HHS official at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. (Lurie has been a pandemic adviser to the Biden campaign but said that she does not speak on its behalf.) “The challenge in this whole tragedy will be helping people understand that their individual behavior helps coronavirus cases and with the economic recovery,” she added. “They go together.”
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