After Mr. Sanders gave his final remarks, answering a question about the candidates’ concerns for those affected by or dealing with the coronavirus, Mr. Biden gave his statement. Here is his full answer:

“Number one, as I said at the outset, I just can’t imagine what people are going through right now who have lost someone already. I can’t imagine what people are going through when they have a mom — for example a good friend of ours is sitting outside the window of a nursing home where her mom is because she can’t go in, trying to do sign language to her mom through the window to be able to talk to her.

I can’t imagine — I guess I can imagine the fear and concern people have. Number one, one of the things that I think we have to understand is that this is an all hands on deck. This is, as someone said, maybe it was you, Jake, at the outset, this is bigger than any individual. This is bigger than yourself. This is about America. This is about the world. This is about how we bring people together and make the kind of sacrifices we need to make to get this done.

And so first and foremost what we have to do is start to listen to the science again. As I said, what we did, we met — what I would be doing today, I would be sitting down in the Situation Room literally every day like we did at the outset of other crises we had when we were in the White House and pulling together the best people, not just in the United States but the world, to say what are the prescriptive moves we have to take now to lessen this virus, to beat it, to get to the point where we can save more lives, get more people tested, get more people the kind of care we need.

And what do we do beyond that to make sure that the economic impact on them is in fact rendered harmless, that we in fact make sure every paycheck is met, every paycheck that the people are going to miss, that we keep people in their homes, they don’t miss their mortgage payments, they don’t miss their rent payments. Making sure they’ll be able to take care of education, and by the way, the schools are closing down right now.

There’s so many things we have to do.

In addition to that, what we have to do is we have to have the best science in the world telling what can stay open and what needs to be closed. Like I said earlier, the idea we’re closing schools, which I understand, but not being able to provide lunches to people who need the school lunch program to get by.

The idea that we can close any place, I can understand the decision made to close places where 150 people or more gather. But how do you keep open the drugstore to make sure you can get your prescription? How do you deal with things that necessarily have to be kept going and what’s the way to do that? There should be a national standard for that. It should be coming out of the Situation Room right now.

By the way, the single most significant thing we can do to deal with the larger problem down the road of income inequality, is get rid of Donald Trump. Donald Trump has exacerbated every single one of these problems, both the immediate urgent need and how we’re going to hold people harmless for the damage done as a consequence of this virus. It’s important we do both.”