it s continue:in the east, 7:00 a.m. in the west. today americans have been dreading the book end to one of the busiest travel seasons on record that has certainly seen its fair share of headaches for travelers. we re live from atlanta s airport as folks hope to start off the new year the right way. and overseas, russia unleashing a swarm of drone strikes on ukraine, showing no signs of backing down from the strategy of targeting key infrastructure amid the bitter winter cold. we re live in the region with the latest as we approach the one-year mark of russia s invasion. also ahead, the family of the suspect arrested in connection to the killing of those four university of idaho students is addressing that arrest. what the suspect s lawyer and the police chief there are telling nbc news. plus, new chaos on capitol hill with republicans set to take control of the house. how kevin mccarthy s bid for the speaker s gavel just got even more complicated thanks to his very own
imagine the global impact. thus, the testing requirements, we re probably not going enough, though, in the united states to catch some of those new variants even with our attempts at the testing and doing things at airports, because that s just a limited population. it only gets volunteers who offer their samples for genetic surveillance. people will come with a negative tests, but those samples are from before their flight. we want to get reliable data on genetic surveillance all around the world, including china, and we re not getting that. a subvariant of omicron ha become the dominant strain in the u.s. it accounts for 40% of confirmed cases. that s double from just a week ago. how concerned are you about this new variant and do we know about the severity? yeah, great questions. we do know there s an been uptick in hospitalizations in new york, in the metropolitan area of new york city and surrounding areas and that shows us for people over the age of