What the Biden administration would do differently on covid-19
PARTISANSHIP HAS long coloured American perceptions of covid-19. Even so, the contrast between the top echelons of the main parties was striking on November 9th, the day the country passed 10m recorded cases of the disease. On that day the White House of outgoing President Donald Trump was dealing with reports that it may have hosted a second superspreading event in the span of a month—this one for an election-night party that may have sickened Ben Carson, the housing secretary, among others. The same day, President-elect Joe Biden announced the members of the coronavirus advisory board for his transition, staffed by the sort of public-health experts the president likes to mock.
While national attention was otherwise diverted, an extraordinary third surge in covid-19 infections began in the weeks before the presidential election. There are now 1,000 new deaths reported each day along with 120,000 new infections. Even though testing has been ramped up to nearly 1.5m per day, the test-positivity rate is approaching 10%—suggesting that even now, many infections are being missed. In all but a handful of states, there seems to be uncontrolled transmission, limiting the efficacy of contact-tracing. Hospitalisations had been declining up until the end of September, when they bottomed out under 30,000. Now they have doubled to over 60,...