What might a Biden COVID task force do differently?

Joe Biden says his first priority as president will be creating a COVID task force. What would this look like, and how might the approach be different than the current one? Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“I think that this treatment of the COVID-19 infection has been a priority all along,” Cohen said. “It has become a political issue in the past few months when in all reality, it’s really a public health issue. So let’s just think about what the decision tree looks like for coming up with a plan … Under it we have two choices: One is treatment, and the other is prevention. So if we follow the treatment arm, treatment really boils down to therapeutic medicines that we haven’t invented yet.”

“There’s some that we have that we’re currently using, for example, remdesivir, dexamethasone, or convalescent plasma,” he added. “But these are really treatments for acute infections, so that’s not something that the coronavirus task force can recommend for the general population.”

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Dr. Cohen says that despite the formation of the task force, he believes the approach will generally look like what we’ve already been doing.

“So then we move out of that into the prevention arm of this pathway we’re describing, and this really boils down into two things, which is one, therapeutics, and the other is the non-therapeutic option,” he said. “Therapeutics would be like developing a vaccine, which would be prevention. And as we know, there’s a race to develop a vaccine going on right now, so that moves us back into the non-therapeutic arm.”

Should politicians or doctors be making policy on COVID-19?

“So in the non-therapeutic arm, what are the things we could do? Well, prevention has involved wearing masks, which we’re already doing, social distancing, which we’re already doing … so I’m sort of not really sure what recommendations some new task force can come up with other than doing what we’re already doing.”

Will lockdowns become considered again?

“Look, coronavirus is a transmittable communicable infection, and it’s transmitted from person to person. The only way to reduce the incidence of it is to reduce person to person contact,” Cohen explained. “I don’t think this is magic and I don’t think there’s lots of choices. I think that there’s a very limited number of choices what we could do when dealing with a communicable disease like this.”

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