just had news in the last couple hours there were 90,000 new covid cases, just today. that s about 10,000 more than we saw yesterday s reporting. and yesterday had broken the record. not the record for omicron, not the record for just this year but the record for daily new cases since the pandemic began. so we are seeing in ernest a massive spike in the number of cases. chuck it is not just about cases. in the uk we re seeing this huge up tick and deaths have more or less stayed the same. they have kind of flat lined. so we re hearing from officials in government they are worried that hospitals and much loved nhs system here is going to be overwhelmed come january or in the coming weeks. that as big worry here and one of the reasons boris johnson the prime minister put that vaccine thing on overdrive. he s putting all of his eggs in this booster basket, really.
cases will be less severe than delta cases? the thing i worry about is that 28% of adults are not vaccinated and that is where omicron is really going to have a major impact. what we worry about is severe disease, hospitalization and death. and people who are vaccinated and vaccinated and boosted are largely going to be protected from severe disease. what we have are hospitals regionally dealing with lot of patients there with delta and now omicron is going to occur on top of that. so we worry about hospital capacity hit by the unvaccinated swaths of the population. people talk a lot about boosterers but first and second doses are much more important to get into people s armsboosters but first and second doses are much more important to get into people s arms. is there a case to be made this is the last gaps of the virus because it mutated this way and it is about to spread as fast as it is? or are we now in line for a lot
a different type of vaccine, one that induces more antibodies, for example, in your nose and stops transmission better than we ve seen with the mrna vaccines. and our current vaccines are holding up against what matter, serious disease, hospitalization and death. governor of kentucky had a regarding nurses last week. other states have had issues. now we ve got hospitals essentially a one two three punch of flu, delta, omicron. i know healthcare workers have been in a break point for months. what can the federal government do to make sure it just doesn t totally collapse on it in january? it is going to be very difficult to avoid that happening because as you said, healthcare workers have been pushed to the brink for so long. we re dealing with unvaccinated patient after unvaccinated patient. it gets frustrating. there is less of us. i think the federal government can use resource likes fema, national disaster medical system
going to come into contact with delta or omicron, one of the other. so it is important to continue to wear a mask if you are unvaccinate 8d. use rapid tests judiciously to make sure you are not a danger to others but we have to know we re going to see increased cases. omicron is going to cause spikes in cases on p top of the delta spike that we re still in. are you confident we re not gonna have to redo the vaccines for omicron or tweak them or get a fourth booster? what is your sense of what is likely? one year from now are most of us going to have to get boosted for a fourth time in most cases? it is too early to know and there are second-generation vaccines in development. ones that are more universal, covering more coronaviruses. companies are at work on an omicron booster and i think there is a lot of merit to that issue. even with a third dose you may not see complete drop of transmissibility of people. so it might be advantageous to have one specifically directed towards tha
to augment hospitals and they can also have hospitals work better at load balancing is one hospital is not getting crushed while another is okay. there is a lot the federal government can coordinate and do. but it is going to be hard no matter what. and doctor, whether you are if you are boosted and you have done everything you can and you wear a mask, should you still expect to get omicron? is it that contagious. i still do think we re going to see breakthrough cases. the cases there are are immune evasive and we know the third dose of these first-generation vaccines doesn t generate that many antibodies in your nose. so i don t think the booster is going to be a panacea for stopping every breakthrough infection. i think the goal is still to reremember that first and second doses are going prevent you from getting hospitalized and i think