would have looked at me and said, biden, what are you drinking, but that s what it did. now, we don t know what s going to happen from here. there s some evidence that in south africa where a lot of this started that it s dropping off quickly, too, we don t know. but i do know that we re not going to be in a position like i said, remember when we were having trouble with masks and gowns and the like. i said, i promise you. i got questions, why are you still paying for all these masks and gowns? why are you stockpiling this? turns out we re going to need it. doctor, you know, you and i had a conversation toward the end of the summer i believe on a podcast that i hosted. we talked about what the future looked like and you were pretty clear eyed about the likelihood that would be more variants coming and the likelihood there could be variants even worse than delta coming. we ll talk about omicron in a second, but when you hear joe biden say it didn t take long at all, what do you think
gotten tested before traveling or seeing family for the holidays. if that s the case, images like you re seeing now probably look familiar. lines down the street, in the cold, three, four, five hours of waiting. these particular photos are in gotham city, this is from washington, d.c. take a look at this ariel shot. this is what the situation looks like in miami, florida. embarrassing, frankly. two years into a global pandemic that has dominated all of our lives. again, it is very possible you already have personal experience in this arena. behind the surge in testing, omicron, which the cdc now says is the dominant variant of covid in the united states. 73% of new cases in this country and upwards of 90% in certain areas. feels like that in new york city. sadly yesterday officials in texas announced what is thought to be the first omicron related death in the u.s. an unvaccinated man over the age of 50 with underlying health conditions who had contracted
now we are where we are. what happened in the course of that two weeks? i know the answer is omicron, but what happened inside the white house in terms of their thinking? that s a key question and it s a question i posed to the president. which is essentially, americans are in line and a lot of them are taking why did this take so long? why is it only know we re talking about sending tests to people? ramping up testing sites? the white house is essentially saying that it s because no one foresaw omicron becoming the dominant variant. the president, if he had told me a couple of weeks ago this virus would be eight times more likely to spread than delta, i might not have really seen that coming. of course, there are experts who say we ve been worried about variants for a long time and the white house was slow to do this, so in some ways, we have a white house that s changing with the science. jen psaki defended her sort of answer to sending tests to people and she said essentially she
healthcare systems now where delta s been hitting, this is really going to become a problem. that really wasn t addressed today at all and that s to me the biggest challenge. it s not the respirators, the ventilators. it s going to be the personnel and we just haven t addressed that. we ve got the 14-day change in the united states. cases up 20%. hospitalizations up 14%. deaths up 3%. and that s, you know, we ve not even begun to feel the blizzard of omicron. now let s look at the delta versus omicron in the united states. percentage of all cases. look at this change. the week of november 28th. delta, 99%. omicron, 1%. and now, the week of december 12th to 18th, delta, 27%, omicron, 73%. so you know, mike, that s a, that s just a blizzard. it s like the blizzard from hell. it looks like a monster, right? i know there is data now from
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