This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Steve Mirsky.For this installment of our preelection podcast series I spoke to Scientific American’s senior medicine editor Josh Fischman.Tell me about the issues in medicine and public health that are going to be affected by this election. Obviously, the first one is the coronavirus pandemic.“Yeah, COVID is the big one. And it’s going to be affected by this election because we have the current Trump administration, which has a record that we can look at. And that record is of handling the coronavirus poorly―ignoring a lot of public health advice.And the results are sadly obvious to most of the country: we’ve got cases going up in 38 states. And the reasons for this are the administration’s ongoing refusal to develop a robust contact tracing force, to develop tests and a testing program that will enable public health authorities to quickly identify hotspots and isolate people.So step one would be to get the virus under control. And the Biden campaign actually has announced a plan to do that by increasing the number of contact tracers, by starting up a national testing board with the ability and the resources to ramp up testing.
