Cleveland Clinic, just named the second best hospital in the world in U.S. News rankings, will co-host the event along with Case Western Reserve University, a private and prominent research university created in 1967.

The first of three debates scheduled before the November election, Tuesday's debate will be held  at the Samson Pavilion at CWRU on the clinic's main campus and will air uninterrupted from 9 pm to 10:30 pm on every major network and cable news channel.

The University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana had originally agreed to be the host but pulled out amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Both Biden and Trump received a limited number of tickets for invited guests to tonight's debate , which is essentially off limits to the public fur to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since the pandemic broke in early March Ohio has reported 152,000 confirmed cases and some 4, 746 deaths, the U.S. alone compiling some seven million cases and roughly 205,000 coronavirus deaths.

Led by four- term mayor Frank Jackson, the city's third Black mayor, Cleveland is a major American city, and a Democratic stronghold that sits in Cuyahoga County, also a Democratic stronghold, and the second largest  of 88 counties in Ohio, a pivotal state for presidential elections.

Cleveland became the first major city to elect an African-American mayor when voters elected the late Carl B Stokes to the post in 1967, Stokes the brother and only sibling of the late Louis Stokes, the first Black congressman from Ohio.

A former longtime U.S. senator, Biden served as vice president under former president Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, from 2009 to 2017, the year Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality television host who won over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, took over as president.