cold-like symptoms. infants and older adults may develop severe infection. at yale new haven children s hospital there are now more than 100 rsv cases in the emergency department. that s nearly double from just a week ago. have you ever seen numbers like this before? definitely not as high as we ve been seeing them now and i would also say from over the years, just like the acuity and how sick the kids are, it s much higher than it s been ever in the past. reporter: doctors say this may be the result of young kids having relatively little exposure to other viruses during several years of covid. a lot of kids haven t seen rsv and they re seeing it for the first time all at once and it s leading to a big strain on our hospital resources. it was a big struggle for him to get a breath of air. reporter: his diagnosis, rsv. if you ve seen a child in that kind of distress with that
who are choosing not to get vaccinated even though they re eligible. your new analysis shows that almost every single unvaccinated american who hasn t gotten covid yet is likely to catch it. how soon could that happen? well, as i ve said time and time again for months, this virus is highly infectious. if you decide to try to run the game clock out, don t try to do it. this virus will find you, it will infect you eventually. and we just have to give people that sense. now, if that s not enough to motivate people to get vaccinated, then the only other things i think we have are the mandates that say if you re going to work here or go here, you have to get vaccinated. it s not just us trying to tell you we re trying to protect you, but if you are a case and you become infectious, you do two things. one is you pose a risk to others including your own loved ones. and you re also using hospital resources right now which in many instances are very, very short and coming, particularly
christmas eve and that s with testing shortages. and none of the data includes results from those at-home covid tests. the nation overall is averaging 200,000 new cases each day right now. also concerns are growing around the risks for children. there s still a lot we don t know about the severity of omicron and people without immunity like kids who haven t been vaccinated. what we do know is the number of child hospitalizations for covid have quadrupled in new york city in recent weeks. nbc s mike memoli is traveling with the president in delaware. also with us is an epidemiologist from fielding school of public health. mike, we ll start with you in delaware. what did president biden say about what he s doing to shore up testing supplies and hospital resources? reporter: the president touched down here in delaware in the last hour.
accepting a mild infection or asymptomatic case more and more. versus preventing somebody from getting severely ill, using hospital resources. if you think about the latter, i would say with two doses, we are mainly there as a society. three doses as a booster, definitely there, even for older and immunocompromised individuals. but to think about prevention of infection, we ll be in this endless loop of probably getting a booster every so often. so, it all depends on where we are. i think if 0micron sneaks through the world, the vaccinated get breakthrough infection, that resulting hybrid immunity may be enough of a superpower to fend off additional variance. let s take a look at some other stories in the headlines. michael flynn, the a long time