Within the first week of undertaking his presidential position, Joe Biden has been constantly working with his team to ensure maximum vaccination and a covid relief country.
But with the increasing infection cases and new variants on the rise, the 100 million vaccines in 100 days strategy is met with critical challenges.
Biden Challenged To Facilitate Better Covid Tracking Measures
When the coronavirus first hit during the Trump administration, lack of immediate and effective measures resulted in the death of 471K people with 27.3 million infected cases.
Citizens weren’t informed enough regarding the impact of the virus and vaccine supply was extremely limited.
Now with the new Biden administration and the rising variants, Americans now worry about history being repeated.
Even though Biden has established various measures to tackle the pandemic, citizens prefer to know the impact of the new variants at first to be further prepared.
The new vaccines Pfizer and Moderna are able to provide immunity against the infection. But public health officials said that they may not be equally effective for the new variants as they are said to be twice dangerous.
The United States has called for more generic sequencing as quick measures have to be taken before the second variant runs out of control.
Health Experts state that the country needs to sequence between 5 and 10% of all positive samples from recent covid tests to understand the path of the virus spread.
At present, the sequencing rate is said to be around half of 1%.
Chief Medical Officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, Marcus Plescia remarked that the new variants are the biggest challenges to be faced in the coming days.
But apart from the genetic sequencing, the Biden government has not yet been able to ensure 100% vaccine tests, data collection on infection cases, tracking virus spread, and the most important of all, educating the people about the incoming impact of new variants.
Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, Georges Benjamin stated that the fundamentals weren’t fixed back then which led to the virus going out of control.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have regulated new measures to inform people regarding the type of masks they should be wearing and the steps to ensure maximum protection.
Health experts say that though it is necessary to implement faster virus tracing, the key to better infection control lies in making covid tests more available, be it at home or at clinics.
Chair of the Immunology and Infectious Diseases Department at Harvard’s Public Health School, Sarah Fortune stated that it is crucial to educate the people about reporting the virus, especially for the new variant as well the Public Health System to trace the virus effeciently.
Public Health Officials state that although now it is impossible to track down every covid case from the beginning, immediate measures must be taken to track the new variant.