supermarket. a moment of silence held at the city s black lives matter plaza for the ten killed and three wounded in the racially motivated attack. also today loved ones gathered in syracuse for the funeral to have the youngest shooting victim, 32-year-old roberta drury. now to the state of the pandemic. the number of daily covid cases, once again, topping 100,000 each day. cbs s lilia luciano joins us from los angeles with concerns about a massive undercount. lilia. reporter: that s right, adriana. here in l.a. county, we haven t seen numbers this high in three months since february and, as you said, there are fears those numbers are severely underreported. hospitalizations are up 22% nationwide, but for many, covid concerns are a thing of the past. more people are, you know, getting a little more liberal going outside without their mask on. reporter: nearly 75% of the u.s. population lives in a high or substantial risk area for
guidelines as we deal with the new variant and this. 59% of cases in the u.s. here are the new omicron variant. the seven-day average here continues the bad record breaking we ve seen. in fact, we have another record high today. over 253,000 daily covid cases. we re also seeing more people going to the hospital. the number of children hospitalized with covid is also rising. most of them though not vaccinated. so. in respect, it follows some of the trends we ve seen. now, i want to make sure that we all understand the moment we re in. while the covid rate, the number of cases is hitting these all time highs, and that s a big concern. the rate of hospitalization is still actually down. and things are not as deadly as they were last year at this time, although case rate is as bad as last winter. so you can keep those things in
750,000 daily covid cases. almost 750,000. doctor offit, we re still waiting on the cdc to update the masking guidance potentially recommending what are called n-95 or kn-95 masks for better protection. take a look at what one study found about mask leakage. take a look at this. you could see the numbers n-95 went to 10%. surgical masks 15%. cloth masks 75% mask leakage. are americans walking around with cloth masks essentially underprotected from this omicron variant which is so highly transmissible? yeah, cloth masks are better than nothing but not much better than nothing. if you could get an n-95 mask and that is certainly a value and other wise the surgical mask could offer protection. please be vaccinated and we will