Biden said will ramp up rapid diagnostic testing across USA “I want to be very clear: The goal of mask wearing is not to make your life less comfortable, or to take something away from you,” Biden said Monday. “It is to give something back to all of us, a normal life.”
Biden also said he will ramp up the availability of rapid diagnostic testing across the country. The Trump administration has substantially increased testing since the beginning of the outbreak, but some public health specialists say the administration should have invested more in testing. Proponents of more widespread testing say that it helps identify infectious people, who can then quarantine and cut off chains of transmission before they balloon into outbreaks.
In addition to testing, Biden said he is “building a corps of contact tracers who will track and curb this disease.”
Contact tracing is the process whereby trained personnel contact people who have tested positive for the virus and identify others who might have been exposed and infected. It’s long been used to contain infectious diseases like tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, but it’s never been implemented on the scale demanded by the pandemic.
World Health Organization officials have repeatedly called on countries to scale up their contact-tracing infrastructure along with the ability to test broadly for the coronavirus.
Infectious disease specialists from Johns Hopkins University and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials proposed a plan in early April to ramp up a national test and trace effort. It would require a workforce of 100,000 people, the proposal said, and cost $3.6 billion.
Biden also vowed to ramp up production of personal protective equipment such as medical gowns, masks and gloves, which help health workers avoid infection while treating Covid-19 patients. On the website for the president-elect’s transition team, Biden says he plans to “fully use the Defense Production Act” to increase supply of PPE.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/09/president-elect-biden-implores-americans-to-wear-a-mask-its-not-a-political-statement.html