Joe Biden has taken office as President of the United States a year after the pandemic first came to the country's shores.
On Donald Trump's last day in office, the death toll hit 400,000 — about as many American lives as were lost in World War II, and double the number the former president flagged last March.
President Biden began his inauguration with the first national memorial to those lives lost. Iconic structures like the Empire State Building and Space Needle were lit up, while church bells rang across the country.
It was a message to Americans: a new regime is here, and it has the coronavirus in its sights.
Forget Biden vs Trump — it's Biden vs coronavirus from here on in.
"We are entering what may well be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus," Biden said in his inauguration speech. "We must set aside the politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation."
The new President is acutely aware of the scale of the fight ahead of him. It took 12 weeks for the country to climb from 200,000 deaths to 300,000, but just over a month to leap to 400,000.
That could rise to half a million deaths by mid-February, according to the incoming director of the Centers for Disease Control, Rochelle Walensky.
"That doesn't speak to the tens of thousands of people who are living with a yet-uncharacterised syndrome after they've recovered," she added, referring to the survivors experiencing what's been dubbed "long COVID".
Loading...More than 24 million Americans have been infected with the virus — almost as many people as we have in Australia.
In Biden's own words, he'll need to "move heaven and Earth" to tame the pandemic. But he plans to "manage the hell out of this operation".
This ambition stands in stark contrast to that of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who told Americans last February that, "like a miracle" the virus would "just disappear".
So, what's the plan?
While Trump spent his final month in office fighting to overturn the election result, Biden was preparing an ambitious $US1.9 trillion plan.
Presented as an "economic rescue" package, it contains a $US415 billion pandemic-busting fund.
While Republicans have argued the economy must come before disease control, Biden understands that he can't revive the economy without first controlling the virus.
Loading...His plan is much the same as it was last March, and realises some of the simple epidemic control strategies that health authorities begged for as the body count mounted.
Among these are ramping up testing, retrofitting schools to be "COVID safe" so parents can return to work, hiring 100,000 public health workers for contact tracing and vaccine outreach, and mandating and funding paid leave so people can quarantine.
Biden also announced that he will make the White House Office of Science and Technology a Cabinet-level agency, a public show of putting experts front and centre.
In his very first executive order as President, Biden mandated physical distancing and mask wearing in all federal buildings. He wants all state governors to mandate masks, but can't compel them to do so.
While the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" honed federal ambition on developing a vaccine, Biden knows there's more to disease control than inoculation.
But mass vaccination is firmly in his sights.
Turning around a 'dismal failure'
"Operation Warp Speed" helped deliver two vaccines at, well, warp speed, but it's been criticised for failing to prepare for the production and distribution of those vaccines. Distribution has been left to under-resourced states already swamped by COVID hospitalisations and deaths.
As a result, the early rollout of the vaccine was what Biden called a "dismal failure", only making it a quarter of the way to the Trump administration's goal to immunise 20 million people by the end of 2020. Only around a third of vaccines delivered to states had been administered by mid-January, with some doses expiring on the shelf.
Biden plans to use the Defence Production Act to compel companies to produce the goods necessary for a faster vaccine rollout, which Trump did not do. More mass vaccination clinics would be established and the National Guard and retired medical professionals enlisted to help.
Biden wants 100 million shots to be administered in his first 100 days, which Dr Anthony Fauci says is "absolutely doable".
The respected infectious diseases expert, who Trump once derided as "a disaster", will stay on as Biden's chief medical adviser for the COVID-19 response. "Like every good doctor, he'll tell me what I need to know, not what I want to know," Biden said.
Back in November, Trump floated firing Fauci "after the election". Instead, the expert has remained in the White House fold, while the man who suggested people drink bleach has been sent packing.
In his final hours in office, Trump announced that border restrictions would relax from January 26. The response from the Biden administration was swift: that won't be happening.
And so concludes the Trump corona chapter.
Still, obstacles remain
On top of the pandemic, Biden inherits an economic calamity. Nearly nine million fewer Americans have a job than at the start of 2020.
His $US1.9 trillion recovery package still needs to pass Congress. Its eye-watering price tag will likely find few Republican fans.
Biden argues record-low interest rates make it the perfect time to borrow and spend big. Many of the advisers who worked with him in the Obama administration feel they underspent on stimulus during the 2009 recession. Progressive economists argue that hampered the country's economic recovery.
But Republicans and some moderate Democrats may feel $1.9 trillion is overkill on top of the $US900 billion and $US2.2 trillion packages already passed last March and December.
Republicans are also likely to oppose some of the more controversial aspects of the recovery plan, like raising the minimum wage to $15, which conservative economists argue will kill some small businesses.
And that's putting aside the distraction of Trump's impeachment trial.
While Biden has already started a blitz of executive orders, Congress has the "power of the purse", and its sign-off is required on anything that costs money — which is most things.
A patchwork system
Biden wants the federal government to play a more active role in managing the pandemic, with greater coordination with the states, but he still faces a patchwork of poorly-linked state healthcare systems.
There's also significant opposition to lockdowns and other restrictions among state governors, including some who were the fastest to impose them last year.
"We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass," said New York Governor Anthony Cuomo. "The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open."
Loading...Uniting a fractured country
One of the greatest challenges for Biden will be the partisanship that's plagued the pandemic.
Under Trump's leadership, disease control became an ideological battleground, and a vast gap emerged in how people with different political leanings viewed the threat.
President Trump has been staunchly anti-mask, so it's little wonder Gallup surveys found Democrats were significantly more likely to wear masks than Republicans.
A global poll by Pew in the middle of last year found 76 per cent of Republican supporters felt the US was handling the pandemic well. Just 29 per cent of Democrat supporters thought the same.
That's a 47-point gap on party lines. The equivalent partisan gap in Australia? Five percentage points.
"With unity, we can overcome this deadly virus", said Biden in his inauguration speech.
But as we've seen time and again in America, uniting is often far easier said than done.
The clock is ticking
The United States is facing a race against time to get the country vaccinated as states run out of hospital beds and new, more infectious strains of the virus threaten to increase transmission even further.
If the virus does "disappear" it won't be the result of a miracle, but an administration "moving heaven and Earth" to make it happen.