The White House will announce a Biden Covid task force on Monday as a response to the worsening coronavirus outbreaks in the U.S.
The Biden Covid task force will be co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University, according to a Biden campaign official who talked to NBC. Axios first mentioned the announcement.
President-elect Joe Biden, in his initial speech, said that he will introduce “a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisors” to help execute his coronavirus pandemic management plan.
“Our work begins with getting Covid under control,” he said. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern. I will spare no effort — or commitment — to turn this pandemic around.”
According to CNBC, the announcement suggests that Biden is prioritizing the pandemic response.
He will not be sworn into office until January 20, when epidemiologists and medical experts believe the U.S. could be suffering from a dangerous condition if current trends remain. When NBC News predicted Biden’s victory, the U.S. posted its third-straight record increase in daily new Covid-19 infections, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Average daily new cases are increasing by at least 5% in 47 states and the District of Columbia, based on a CNBC analysis of Hopkins data.
Urgency of action
According to Dr. Leana Wen, the former Baltimore health commissioner, Biden can start encouraging compliance with public health protocols even before he officially starts his work.
“His work needs to begin right now. He needs to begin communicating the urgency of actions with the American people,” she said in a phone interview. “His biggest challenge is going to be getting people to follow his recommendations. He can have the best policies and even the best way to implement his policies, but unless you can win the hearts and minds of the American people, it’s not going to make a difference.”
Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, explained that if the U.S. still has the same trends, the U.S. could post over half a million coronavirus deaths before Biden takes office.
“It’s going to get much worse this winter,” she said. “We are surging all across the country. There are firestorms of Covid-19 that we’re seeing in virtually every part of the country, and it is getting worse by the day.”
Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, had similar concerns about the months ahead.
“The worst days of the pandemic are almost certainly still ahead of us,” she said. “This virus is now spread across the entire United States. When the first surge came, it was localized to the Northeast in New England, New York, New Jersey. In the second wave, it was the South and Southwest. But now we’re seeing it literally takeover hospitals across the country.”
She also mentioned that with a Biden presidency, she is hoping for a nationally coordinated response to the pandemic, but until Jan. 20, “it’s like we’re on our own.”
Ranney stressed that several of her “colleagues and friends,” whom she did not specify, will be part of Biden’s Covid task force and will help him “hit the ground running on day one” when he takes office.
“But the trouble is, even with hitting the ground running on day one, it’s going to take two months to manufacture adequate PPE,” she said. “Even if on day one, he says, ‘I’m going to create a mask mandate,’ it’s going to take a while to disseminate that and to get the messaging out.”
