as more omicron cases pop up around the country; however, the decision to make it and what s behind it for the cdc director to say it had to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate. let s start there. let s bring in our panel, mollie hemingway senior editor at the federalist. charles lane opinion writer for the washington post and the washington post columnist marc thiessen. i guess that perked up my ears. marc, listening to following the science for so long. yeah. no, i mean, honestly, we would have been better off in this if the cdc didn t exist. it s been a disaster from the beginning. just this week they revised downward the prevalence of the omicron variant from 73.2% which they reported great confidence last week know they said it was actually 22.5. that s not a minor revision. that s a 50.7 percentage points. how do you get that badly wrong. and they did this now on the isolation? they also came up with the six feet distance rule out of whole
best to protect them as well as ourselves. it is stunning how quickly this has moved. not even a month has passed since we first heard about omicron. look what s happened in the past couple of weeks. less than 1% of new cases were only krofnlt week ending december 11th that jump to 12.6 and now 73.2% so in two weeks it went from almost nothing to being almost three-quarters of the new cases in the united states. now, let s take a look at where it s even higher than 73%. there are pockets in the southeast as well as in the northwest where it s actually omicron is actually 95% of new cases so as i said just stunning how quickly this variant has spread. kate? elizabeth, thank you for that. and we know that a key element of the president s announcement today it centers on testing as you new omicron variant washes across the country. the lack of tests and delay in test results has become even
wow. reporter: it is a wow. you and i were sitting here not even a month ago that omicron was even named. it hasn t even been with us for a whole month. take a look at what s happened in the past two weeks. if you look at the week ending december 4th, omicron was 0.7% of all new cases in the united states. most of the rest was delta. december 11th, it crept up to 12.6%. the week ending december 18th, 73.2%. that s a huge jump in just two weeks. it s even more than 73% in certain parts of the country. in the north west as well as the southeast in 12 states it s more than 95%. that s just how highly transmissible this variant is. jim? a big question has been does the country, do the agencies, the cdc, et cetera, change the responses to this new outbreak given that we have so many more people vaccinated? and dr. fauci said this morning an interesting possibility here,
it, people with a lot of problems for there is been a shift in federal law enforcement that you will notice. in 2004, 57% of federal arrests were of american citizens while 43% were noncitizens. in 2014, a decade later, the most recent year where we have full data, the numbers were flipped. noncitizens were 61% of arrests where citizens were 39% s. the surging noncitizen arrest was because of a big increase of arresting for offenses like human smuggling and unlawful entry. there has been an explosion of people caught entering the u.s. again and again. it s not just we become more primitive, more people are coming. in 1992, 690 people convicted of unlawful entry into this country. in 2014, 16,556 people were convicted in an increase of 24 times. again, not because the obama administration was a lot tougher. they were just a lot more criminals to arrest. in 73.2% of cases, these people, the ones who got arrested, had a prior criminal history in this
problems for there is been a shift in federal law enforcement that you will notice. in 2004, 57% of federal arrests were of american citizens while 43% were noncitizens. in 2014, a decade later, the most recent year where we have full data, the numbers were flipped. noncitizens were 61% of arrests where citizens were 39% s. the surging noncitizen arrest was because of a big increase of arresting for offenses like human smuggling and unlawful entry. there has been an explosion of people caught entering the u.s. again and again. it s not just we become more primitive, more people are coming. in 1992, 690 people convicted of unlawful entry into this country. in 2014, 16,556 people were convicted in an increase of 24 times. again, not because the obama administration was a lot tougher. they were just a lot more criminals to arrest. in 73.2% of cases, these people, the ones who got arrested, had a prior criminal history in this