desymbol: Obama Health Official Says The U.S. Can Virtually Eliminate Covid-19 When “We Decide To”

Andy Slavitt, a top health official back in President Barack Obama’s administration, recently explained that the United States can virtually beat the Covid-19 pandemic at any time that Americans decide to.

Slavitt started off by pointing to countries that were the most successful in fighting the novel coronavirus, explained what should be done in the US point-by-point, showed us what the public’s reaction would be like, and stressed what should be done after the majority of Covid-19 cases were snuffed out.

Read on for one of the most insightful coronavirus analyses and action plans we’ve seen so far in 2020, dear Pandas! Be sure to let us know what you think about Slavitt’s ideas and how realistic they are in the comments.

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Ex-Obama health official Andy Slavitt explained in great detail how the US can beat Covid-19

Image credits: ASlavitt

“I think we were founded on principles of liberty and freedom and distrust of government. And some of that makes us who we are. But that also means that we need really good leadership in times like these because we have to do difficult things. Nobody asked for this virus, and we’re all going to be inconvenienced by it one way or another. And so it takes an enormous amount of leadership to tell people that we’ve got to make some sacrifices,” Slavitt told NPR.

Andy Slavitt is a former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. President Obama nominated him to run the CMS in July 2015 after he helped repair the healthcare.gov website after its bumpy rollout. Slavitt did so until January 2017. So when it comes to healthcare, he knows what he’s talking about.

Slavitt’s Twitter thread got over 84.3k likes and more than 43.5k retweets and comments at the time of writing. If the expert wanted to start a discussion about healthcare and what the response to the pandemic should be like, he got his wish. You can also read the expert’s insights about the coronavirus in his post on Medium.

In the latest news about Covid-19, US Republicans introduced a 1 trillion dollar recovery plan to address the economic impact the pandemic has had in the country. As part of the plan, schools would get 100 billion dollars in support. Meanwhile, most Americans would get 1.2k dollar stimulus payments. However, the plan would also reduce the 600-dollar weekly unemployment benefit bonus to 200 dollars until states can come up with an alternative.

The pandemic has hit the US especially hard. According to the BBC, around 15 million jobs were lost since February 2020. Meanwhile, according to the latest data collected by Johns Hopkins University, there are nearly 4.3 million confirmed cased of Covid-19 and 148k coronavirus-related deaths in the US. If put into action, Slavitt’s plan might just be what gets the US out of this crisis.