Playing Catch-up with COVID-19

Open Letter to: Biden’s COVID-19 Taskforce

Forming a Biden COVID-19 Taskforce is an exceedingly smart thing for President-elect Biden to do. Given the currently worsening status of the Corona virus in almost every state, this is not a national problem that can wait for a strategy and plan for a post-inauguration timeframe. Without some significant changes in the current Administration’s policies the entire burden of this pandemic is falling to and depending upon the states’ governors, mayors, and local leaders. As we have seen, this has been hit-and-miss which decreases both the efficacy of the healthcare efforts and the restoration of the US economy.

Because there is an inherent lag-time between when the Biden Taskforce can formulate their plans and policies and to have those plans and policies directly have an official means to exert any control over the federal agencies, the taskforce needs to do even more by way of preparing for their leadership than establishing their plan.

In addition to the obvious reorientation of public policy to STEM-based management principles, the taskforce needs to establish and communicate a clear timeline for when any of their changes can have a significant impact on the progression of the virus throughout the nation. No matter how smart and effective any policies or initiatives might be, neither the initiatives nor the Biden Taskforce can deliver results outside of the time that it takes for those policies and initiatives to have Cause and Effect results. As a hypothetical example if the taskforce could issue a policy that would reduce infections/transmissions by 50% the results of that policy if acted upon by the policies’ targeted agents (public, state governors / officials, private sector businesses, or healthcare entities) would still take up to 2 weeks to show results since the virus has up to a 2 week incubation interval.

What this means is that the Biden Taskforce needs to both make this emphatically clear to the Biden Administration and to the public at large. But this is just one step that Biden’s Taskforce needs to take in helping to advance any policy changes, new initiatives or providing implementation plans to bring the Corona virus pandemic under control within the US. There is an active and ballistic trajectory for the Corona virus today that will proceed and change between now and when the Biden Taskforce steps in. That virial momentum must be identified, documented, and presented to the public as a “stake in the ground” from which the Biden Taskforce will begin its activities. This is just a start. There are other efforts that need to proceed the transition so the taskforce can be ready to lead. One task the Biden Taskforce needs to accomplish is to get a current forecast from the CDC and Trump Taskforce on each state’s projected new cases and deaths from the Corona virus for a 2 to 4 week period beyond the Inauguration. Where a state has its own healthcare entities providing their own forecasts, a state-issued forecast for the same interval should be obtained. Any state that does not use either the CDC’s or its own projections of the COVID-19 needs to be identified as a non-proactive state regarding COVID-19 policies. The CDC and/or state forecasts then need to be assessed and compared to forecasts that the Biden Taskforce will formulate around their plans and policies. Again, this is just one of the additional tasks that the Biden Taskforce needs to undertake.

A second task for the Biden Taskforce is to establish liaisons with each state’s COVID-19 healthcare leadership to attempt to engage them in the planning and preparing for any new initiatives and changes. For states that prohibit such contacts or refuse to participate, those states need to be identified and the impact and projections for those states needs to be adjusted according to how their decisions will effect the projections of the virus in their jurisdictions. This is simply due to the time-lag problem associated with how the virus continues to proceed under the conditions being used prior to any changes promoted by the Biden Taskforce. The differences between states that enable early engagement versus those that do not ought to be identified and have the results presented to the Biden Administration and the public. In a general way, the different way in which the taskforce’s policies and initiatives differ based on state’s individual engagements will create a self-identifying experimental test-bed to learn from regarding the efficacy of the policies and initiatives.

These are just two of the task areas that the Biden COVID-19 Taskforce ought to include in their preparations and planning. Imagine how many other activities the taskforce must contend with besides these, and in all of 11 to 12 weeks.