ANALYSIS: Biden has ambitious plans to curb the coronavirus. But they could face big hurdles in a divided country and Congress.

Time is not on his side either, as the country surpassed 128,000 cases on Friday, setting a record for the third straight day, and more than 1,000 people a day are dying — a toll that is expected to grow in coming weeks as the weather turns colder and many Americans retreat indoors. Projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington suggest the worst stretch of the pandemic is likely to hit in mid- to late January, just around the time Biden would take office.

Biden is expected to announce a coronavirus task force Monday, signaling that the virus is his top and immediate priority, according to two people familiar with the plans, who also cautioned that the timing could change and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. Among its co-chairs are Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration, and David Kessler, Food and Drug Administration commissioner under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Both have briefed Biden on the pandemic for months.

The surge is expected to continue unless Trump undertakes aggressive new measures against the virus in his final two months — a prospect considered unlikely since he has repeatedly claimed the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic, even as cases and hospitalizations climbed....

Biden has laid out a far more muscular federal approach than Trump, saying he would urge state and local leaders to implement mask mandates if needed, create a panel on the model of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board to scale up testing and lay out detailed plans to distribute vaccines to 330 million people after they are greenlighted as safe and effective.  ...