WASHINGTON — Overshadowed by a coronavirus pandemic and stock market gyrations, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders sparred Sunday night over how to cope with the crisis and how to pay for the drastic measures needed to save lives and the economy.

With momentum growing and the nomination his to lose, Biden also took the dramatic step of declaring, unprompted, that he will pick a woman as his running mate.

Rarely were the stakes so immediate in a debate, or the challenges less hypothetical.

Biden deflected a question of whether as president, he would order a nationwide lock down to slow the spread of the new disease, pivoting to a critique of the Trump administration for failing to rise to the moment.

“This is a crisis. We’re at war with a virus,” Biden said, poking Sanders for trying to seize on the pandemic as a rationale to revamp the national health care system. “It has nothing to do with copays.”

Sanders argued that the outbreak exposes the weaknesses and inequities of a health care system that leaves 87 million people without adequate insurance.

“How come we don’t have enough doctors?” he demanded, insisting that the first step in addressing the pandemic and saving American lives is to “shut this president up right now, because he is undermining the doctors and the scientists who are trying to help the American people. It is unacceptable for him to be blabbering with unfactual information which is confusing the general public.”

This was the first and perhaps only one-on-one debate for a pair of septuagenarians who’ve been on a collision course for a year. As they auditioned to be commander in chief, both were striving to show they’re ready for a crisis, in a time of crisis.

They’ve scrapped in 10 prior debates since June. But the buffer provided by other candidates is gone, giving voters an opportunity to assess the two finalists side by side without the distraction of also-rans or even an audience — one of the myriad ways the global outbreak of COVID-19 has altered the race.

The pandemic dominated. Biden and Sanders had both issued scathing reviews of the Trump administration’s response in recent days.

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With a solid lead in polls and delegates, Biden had the luxury to return to an “electability” argument that rang hollow just three weeks ago at the last debate.

He hammered his democratic socialist rival as too radical to win, and his confident, commanding demeanor reflected his incontestable role as front-runner.

For Sanders, the debate might have been his final shot to puncture Biden’s aura of inevitability and he throughout the two-hour debate he questioned Biden’s commitment on progressive agenda items.

With the party’s establishment flocking to his side, Biden’s running-mate revelation was sure to set off rampant speculation. Defeated candidates such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris now support him.

“If I’m elected president my cabinet, my administration will look like the country. And I commit that I will in fact appoint a pick a woman to be vice president. There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow,” Biden said.

Hedging very slightly, Sanders indicated that he’s very likely to pick a woman, though he added that finding a “progressive” is paramount.

“In all likelihood, I will,” he said.

Of the major candidates of 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had competed most directly with Sanders for progressive support. She has not issued an endorsement since dropping out, and Biden has sought to co-opt some of the progressive energy Sanders has counted on. On Friday, he abruptly embraced Warren’s plan to unravel a bankruptcy law that Biden wrote in 2005 law.

No hand shake

Five candidates on stage Feb. 25 in South Carolina for the last debate have dropped out, including Klobuchar and Warren.

It has been a whirlwind since the last debate.

The two survivors have shuttered offices and suspended rallies and door-knocking. They avoided the traditional pre-debate hand shake Sunday night and kept the prescribed safe distance throughout the evening.

In the age of COVID-19, anxiety is rampant around the country and the world. Schools have closed. Office workers have been ordered to go home. Sports leagues have cancelled games. Broadway theaters are dark. The stock market’s plunge on Thursday set a record.

Hours before the debate, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near zero, one of the most extreme and rare tools at its disposal.

“They’ve already used what leverage they have,” Biden said.

Both candidates readily acknowledged taking steps to protect themselves.

“I’m not shaking hands,” Sanders said. “I’m using a lot of soap and hand sanitizers… and thank God, right now I do not have any symptoms.”

Biden noted that “I’m in good health” with no underlying conditions that put people at higher risk. “I’m taking all of the precautions,” he said. “I do not shake hands any longer…. We are not doing rallies anymore…. We’re not going into crowds.… I wash my hands God knows how many times a day.”

Lack of audience

With the epidemic growing, the Democratic Party scrapped the audience that would have filled a Phoenix theater. Two days later, on Thursday, the party moved the event to a CNN studio in Washington – a sterile and intimate setting unlike any previous 2020 debate venue.

Biden and Sanders are no strangers to TV studios but it’s harder to score points without audience feedback. Lines that might have worked in a full theater fell flat, as when Sanders — three times in a short span —referred to the current pandemic as “the Ebola crisis.”

That came after Biden had contrasted the Obama administration’s approach to the Ebola crisis to the conflicting messages coming from President Donald Trump and top experts: daily meetings in the Situation Room and “one voice” directed by the Obama White House, “and we beat it.”

When Sanders finally caught and corrected himself after misspeaking, he turned to Biden with a quip: “You got Ebola in my head right now.”

All viewers heard was silence.

Bad time to sniffle

Sanders is 78. Biden is 77. Either would be the oldest president elected to a first term.

When the Democrats cited an “abundance of caution” for moving the debate to a TV studio, it was natural to consider the Centers for Disease Control warnings for anyone over 60 to take extra care to avoid exposure to the novel coronavirus.

President George Bush caught enormous grief for glancing at his watch during a 1992 debate with Democrat Bill Clinton. In 2000, Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, committed the sins of sighing audibly and visible rolling his eyes during a debate with then-Gov. George W. Bush.

The first sound from Biden was throat clearing, a sound that continued when he yielded the floor for the first time to Sanders.

An hour into the debate, Sanders sniffed audibly, though it may have been in disbelief.

Biden was answering a question about how he would persuade Sanders supporters to help him win in the fall — “He’s making it hard for me,” Biden quipped, referring to their bickering, but “If Bernie’s the nominee I will not only support him, I will campaign for him.”

Ideological combat

The ideological fault lines have been obvious throughout the campaign.

On immigration, climate policy, criminal justice, foreign intervention and wealth inequality, Sanders has promised to rewrite the social contract through political revolution, a prospect Biden scoffed at.

Like other Democratic contenders, Biden has argued that Sanders’ democratic socialism goes further than most Americans are comfortable with, and his policies would cost too much and intrude too far.

Sanders vows to cancel existing student loans, for instance, while Biden would ease the college debt burden through loan forgiveness after 20 years of payments.

On the environment, Biden wants to end subsidies for fossil fuel industries and impose emissions caps. Sanders would ban fracking immediately and fossil fuels by 2050.

After enduring one jab after another as Sanders tried to paint him as a late-comer to progressive policies, Biden hit back hard.

In an especially testy exchange he needled Sanders for praising China despite its mistreatment of ethnic minorities, along with the Castro regime in Cuba, and even the Soviet Union, “an awful dictatorship killing millions and millions of people.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

Sanders tried to explain the nuance, saying he rejected authoritarianism utterly but could still recognize effective policies. “Did China make progress in ending extreme progress over the last 50 years, yes or no?”

Biden shot back: “That’s like saying Jack the Ripper did not –“

“No it’s not,” Sanders said.

“Yes it is,” Biden said.

Sanders poked at Biden for taking donations from the health care industry even in the midst of the pandemic. Biden shrugged it aside, insisting that in a time of national emergency, petty political squabbles aren’t relevant.

The Trump campaign was monitoring the debate closely, highlighting perceived vulnerabilities as when Biden vowed that in his first 100 days, no undocumented immigrants would be deported—”including illegal immigrants who commit felonies,” the Trump team noted.