The Beatles, now and then.

The last Beatles, Out now, now and then. Now.

Out now.

This is Scientific Americans.

This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

For this installment of our pre-election podcast series, I spoke to Scientific Americans Senior Medicine

Editor Josh Fishman. Tell me about the issues in... your medicine,

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 in a testing program that will enable authorities, 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.

So at least we could get a handle on who's infected, where infections are spreading rapidly,

and we'll be able to direct resources to isolating that,

not letting it spread.

So I think that that is the starkest and most important contrast.

...