Biden Starts Work, Launches COVID-19 Task Force

President-elect, Joe Biden, on Monday convened a covid-19 task force in other to bring the raging pandemic under control.

News Rain Nigeria gathered that Biden’s task force will have three co-chairs: Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration; David Kessler, Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate dean for health equity research at the Yale School of Medicine. Murthy and Kessler have briefed Biden for months on the pandemic.

Biden Starts Work, Launches COVID-19 Task Force

Taskforce members will work with state and local officials to craft public health and economic policies to address the virus and racial and ethnic disparities, while also working to reopen schools and businesses, the transition team said in a news release.

While the makeup of the task force garnered widespread praise, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the group needs more geographic diversity.

Recall that Biden clinched the presidency on Saturday, four days after the Nov. 3 election, clearing the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. He beat Trump by more than 4 million votes nationwide, making Trump the first president to lose re-election since 1992.

But Trump has not acknowledged defeat and has launched an array of lawsuits to press claims of election fraud for which he has produced no evidence. State officials say they are not aware of any significant irregularities.

Note that the Trump administration has not put forward national plans for testing, contact tracing, and resolving shortages in personal protective equipment that hospitals and health-care facilities are experiencing again as the nation enters its third surge of the virus.

Also note that the United States is recording more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day and, on many days, more than 1,000 deaths, a toll expected to worsen during the crucial 10-week stretch of the transition.