By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I get that Joe Biden isn’t president of the United States just yet.

He insists that he knows we have only one president at a time. Indeed, we do. However, I am glad as the dickens that at least one leading political figure — that would be the president-elect — is talking to us candidly and openly and truthfully about the pandemic that continues to rage out of control.

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris sat down for their first post-election interview together with CNN anchor Jake Tapper. They spoke on a day when we set yet another hideous record for hospitalization and deaths from the pandemic.

Biden pledged that upon taking office he will issue an order declaring that anyone doing business or working on federal property will wear masks and will maintain social distancing.

Got that? Then he asked all Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The president-elect believes that if all Americans don masks and stay way from each other we will see a “dramatic decrease” in the infection rate. Well, I am going to heed his advice … we’ll just have to see how it plays out.

Back to my point, which is that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, hasn’t seen fit to talk at all about the pandemic. Since he lost re-election on Nov 3, Trump has been preoccupied with sowing distrust in our electoral system. He won’t concede that Biden whipped his a** in the election.

Trump should be talking, too, about the pandemic. He should be meeting weekly, if not daily, with his White House pandemic response team that has been rendered virtually useless as Trump pouts over losing an election. Speaking of the response team, what in the world has become of Vice President Mike Pence, the man who is supposed to be in charge of that effort? He is MIA along with the president.

I am grateful beyond measure that the election turned out as it did. As everyone knows — and I have been willing to acknowledge — elections have consequences.

We are witnessing one of those consequences play out in real time as the president-elect steps into the breech that the current president has abandoned.