Each day last week, as the tally of votes for Joe Biden mounted in key states such as Pennsylvania, the daily toll of people infected with Covid-19 in the United States set new records.
While the mounting public-health crisis received relatively little attention during the count, this week president-elect Biden has immediately focused on it. This crisis will clearly dominate his early presidency.
For the next 10 weeks, however, the Trump administration will remain in charge, and given cases grew threefold in the last 10 weeks, it is possible they could have multiplied at a similar rate to reach more than 400,000 new cases a day by inauguration day.
To bring the pandemic under control in the US there will, inevitably, have to be some form of lockdown, which will come with a heavy economic cost. To date the outgoing Congress has refused to pass a second stimulus package to offset the potential serious negative economic effects of such action, effects which will be felt most by low-income households.
Savings
When lockdowns occurred in March and April across much of the European Union and the US, there was very prompt action by governments to provide support to the households and companies that were seriously affected. In many cases, including the US, this initial bout of fiscal support was quite generous, so that those households worst affected by the lockdown were largely insulated from its initial effects.
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