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Form better data collection systems.

One order calls on the health and human services secretary and the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator to re-evaluate the federal government’s Covid-19 data-gathering systems and issue a report on their findings. It also calls on the heads of “all executive departments and agencies” to gather and share coronavirus-related data.

The Trump administration struggled last year to settle on a centralized system, pitting competing programs at the Department of Health and Human Services and the C.D.C. against one another. Alex M. Azar II, the former health and human services secretary, ordered hospitals to send daily reports about virus cases to a private vendor that transmitted them to a central database in Washington, instead of the C.D.C., which had previously housed the data. The decision, which remains in effect, angered C.D.C. scientists.

Establish a health equity task force.

Another order creates a Covid-19 “health equity task force,” which will recommend how to carve out more funding for parts of the population particularly hard hit by the virus, analyzing needs by race, ethnicity, geography and disability, among other factors. Mr. Biden said on Thursday that the task force would address hesitancy toward taking the vaccines.

The panel, housed at the Department of Health and Human Services, is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to draw more attention to persistent racial and ethnic disparities in health care access, as minorities have been hospitalized and died from Covid-19 at substantially higher rates. Mr. Biden appointed Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale, to lead the task force.

Publish guidance for schools and workers.

Mr. Biden issued an order meant to protect the health of workers during the pandemic, telling the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to release new guidance for employers. The order also asks the agency to step up enforcement of existing rules to help stop the spread of Covid-19 in the workplace.

The president also directed the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to issue new guidance on how to safely reopen schools — a major source of controversy over the summer when White House and health department officials pressured the C.D.C. to play down the risk of sending students back.