Job number one


It’s good to know that our “long national nightmare” with Donald Trump will (begin to) end on January 20. Of course, now Biden’s transition team needs to get to work, since it has already lost four or five precious days due to the election result not being known for certain until Saturday. It’s disheartening to hear that the head of the GSA is refusing to recognize the truth and provide Biden’s team with the office space, access to agency heads and money that are due them by law (in 2016, Obama’s GSA head did this for Trump’s team the day after the election), but I would fully expect she will do that in a few days, no matter how long her boss decides to wait before acknowledging reality, if he ever does.

But there is one item that can’t wait until this Friday, let alone January 20 – that’s the pandemic. Just last week it would have been going out on a limb to say that the number of daily new Covid cases in the US would soon go over 100,000 and stay there. However, they’ve been over that number since last Tuesday (it seems the novel coronavirus was determined to let people know on election day that it was still around and thriving), and they’ve probably averaged around 115,000 since then. So if anything not only are new cases continuing to surge, the rate at which they’re surging is also increasing.

Measures need to be taken now. Every day lost will mean lots of unnecessary additional deaths (remember, it was calculated that just the one-week delay in enacting lockdowns over most of the country in March cost something like 20,000 deaths). Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard said on NPR this morning that taking strong measures now (which don’t need to include total lockdowns anywhere), rather than on January 21, could easily save tens of millions of deaths.

Dr. Jha also pointed out that in 2008, after Obama’s first election, his transition team formed a joint committee with George W. Bush’s people to fight the “pandemic” raging that year – the global financial meltdown. Given the number of lives at stake, it would seem completely proper that this year Trump’s and Biden’s team would repeat that action.

Will it happen? I don’t know. But I will say that Republican Congressional leaders should for once do the right thing and make clear they want Trump to cooperate with Biden on the entire transition process, but especially on fighting the coronavirus. If this doesn’t happen, they may pay the price a lot earlier than the next national election in 2022. They may pay it in January in Georgia. And it would be a fitting rebuke.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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