Beating back the surging coronavirus crisis is a challenging, complex undertaking. How do we balance public health with the need to keep the businesses that pose the greatest threat of viral spread afloat? How do we safely socialize when the winter cold makes it harder to do so outdoors? How do we get a vaccine to enough Americans to reach herd immunity? But in at least one way, combating COVID is extremely simple: Wear a damn mask.
Wearing a face covering in public, particularly indoors and when social distancing is not possible, has been known for months to be one of the most effective mitigation strategies, short of a vaccine. Had Donald Trump encouraged their widespread use, rather than politicizing and rebelling against them, a great many lives could have been saved and the nation’s caseload heading into winter may not have been so perilously high.
In their first interview since winning the election, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that they plan to take a different approach. The president-elect outlined the first steps his administration will take to bring the virus under control as it works to get the vaccines to Americans: Listen to experts, and ask the country to mask up for the first 100 days of his presidency. “Just 100 days to mask, not forever,” the president-elect told Tapper. “One hundred days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction.”
Biden also crucially promised in the interview to receive the vaccine himself in a public event to assure a skeptical nation of its safety. “People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work,” Biden said. “Already the numbers are really staggeringly low, and it matters what the president and vice president do.”
“That’s a good thing,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who will serve as Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on the Today Show Friday, of Biden’s promise to get his COVID shots in public. “Having an extraordinarily efficacious vaccine, like we do have, for sure, 94, 95 percent efficacious, doesn’t mean anything if people [don’t] get vaccinated.”
While Biden and Fauci can preach common sense, convincing Americans, particularly those who will remain under Trump’s spell even after he leaves office, won’t be easy. The country has already endured more than 275,000 deaths, with an uptick on the way—as Fauci said Friday, the United States likely hasn’t even hit its post-Thanksgiving peak yet. Without significant change, both in the government response and among individual Americans, things are only going to get worse. “We’re in a very precarious situation right now,” Fauci said. “There certainly is light at the end of the tunnel with a vaccine, but we’re not there yet.”
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