President Plans to Actually Do Something About Pandemic

President-elect Joe Biden, who seems to actually give a shit about the mass deaths caused by coronavirus, will announce a task force on Monday to combat the pandemic.

Biden highlighted the task force in his acceptance speech on Saturday night, saying that he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would rely on a “a group of leading scientists and experts” to make sure the proposal they outlined during the campaign can go into effect as soon as the new administration takes office. The task force will be led by Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, and Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale University physician and professor, according to CNN.

The Biden-Harris plan includes dramatically expanding covid testing, ramping up the production of PPE, investing in vaccine research, and directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hand down specific guidances on social distancing, business closures, and lockdowns to communities based on their rates of viral spread. Biden will also issue a federal mask mandate, calling on all governors to make mask wearing mandatory in their states.

It’s an encouraging departure from the Trump plan which, last I checked, was basically “do nothing.” Just a little more than a week before the election, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (who has since tested positive for covid himself) told CNN that the administration was more or less giving up on controlling the spread of the virus, despite it mounting its third wave.

Unfortunately, that’s still extremely bad news for us, considering that Trump has more than two months left of his presidency and they’re shaping up to be the worst two months in the entire lifespan of the pandemic for Americans. The United States surpassed 10 million coronavirus cases on Sunday, and last week we topped our own record of daily cases for three consecutive days, with the U.S. reporting more than 132,700 on Friday.

Things are looking exceedingly grim on the virus front, but it’s somewhat reassuring to know that a president who believes in science, medicine, and wearing “the biggest mask you’ve ever seen” will soon be in the White House.