Joe Biden photo:VCG

 
US President Joe Biden was expected on Thursday to unveil his plan to tackle the coronavirus crisis, as he starts his first full day in the White House with America confronting a slew of ­challenges.

Biden was sworn in as the 46th US president on ­Wednesday, delivering a calming call to heal a nation riven by festering divisions that had grown deeper under four years of Donald Trump.

Biden took the presidential oath standing on the steps of the US Capitol, the building complex that had been attacked two weeks earlier by a pro-Trump mob seeking to overturn his victory. 

Absent from the ceremony was Trump, who had earlier left Washington for Florida, breaking 152 years of tradition by refusing to attend his successor's inauguration.

Shortly after walking into the White House, his wife Jill by his side, Biden signed a flurry of executive orders, starting with rejoining the 2015 Paris climate accord from which the US withdrew under Trump.

Biden also halted the US exit from the World Health Organization, stopped construction of Trump's cherished wall on the Mexican border, and rescinded a ban on visitors from several Muslim-majority nations.

Biden's presidency will initially be shaped by his response to COVID-19, which has killed more than 400,000 people in the US, and the associated economic emergency.

The number of American coronavirus deaths has surpassed the country's troop fatalities in World War II.

He will look to move quickly on coordinating a federal plan to combat the virus, which for months ran rampant across the country as the Trump administration bungled its response.

Biden was expected to outline his administration's plans later Thursday after he was briefed by his COVID-19 team.

Whereas Trump seldom acknowledged the tragic toll the virus was inflicting on the US, Biden paused in his inaugural address to offer a moment's silent prayer for the victims.

The Democrat also appealed to supporters of Trump, who shattered political norms by belittling rivals, denouncing entire ethnic groups and trying to cast doubt on basic facts.

He confronted head-on the rise of domestic extremism, as evidenced during Trump's presidency by the Capitol assault, deadly attacks on synagogues and immigrants, and a violent march by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.