Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s victories in Georgia have opened up a whole new world of pandemic response.

Last week, only hours before armed but frequently maskless insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol, there was a spot of bright news for Covid-19 relief in Washington. Democrats Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both won Senate seats in Georgia’s runoff election, creating a narrow majority across both sides of Congress for the political party interested in more aggressive spending on Covid-19 response and relief efforts.

Now, amid rolling headlines of stumbling vaccination efforts, many are understandably wondering what that could mean for fighting the pandemic. “The slim majority in the Senate actually is pretty consequential,” Dr. Jen Kates, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “It just opens up a whole new realm of possibility for the new administration that they didn’t have before the outcome of the Georgia election.… And there were already Republicans that probably had been supportive of some additional Covid relief measures, so this might just make that path a little smoother.” Read more at The New Republic.