cases. florida set yet another new record level of more than 58,000 new cases on wednesday. and despite all of this, people are still planning travel, parties and event for new years eve. even as experts predict infection rates will continue to grow. the pre omicron record high for average daily cases was 251,000 set back in january 2021. before vaccines were widely available, more than 85,000 people were hospitalized with covid. some hospitals are overwhelmed. northeast, ohio, issued a plea in sunday s addition of the cleveland will plain dealer. we help. we need your help. we now have more covid-19 patients in our hospital than ever before. and the overwhelming majority are unvaccinated. this is preventable. the best way to avoid serious illness is the vaccine. so, get vaccinated and get your booster. we didn t expect to be here
scene. masking held on. the efficacy for masks, whatever it was pre omicron, is now quite a bit worse. so we can either decide that we are going to mask harder, put our kids in n95s that are larger and tighter and more uncomfortable and will have even greater harms for their educational environment or we can say this is the new reality. masks did not work that well to begin with. vaccines are really the name of the game here, and it s time. we re not getting rid of covid. our cloth masks do very, very little. surgical masks perhaps a little bit more. do we really want to go to n95s? i think that would take us in the wrong direction except for that less than 1% of our population that s highly vulnerable, really immunocompromised, on chemotherapy, has an organ transplant, that decision to protect those really vulnerable
joseph, you say now is the time to start lifting school mask mandates. why? i think it s entirely appropriate and thanks for having me on at this point. i think we can look at a couple of different met rrics that say it s okay. in places like the northeast, the waste water shows us we are back to pre omicron levels. we also know about 50% of the hospitali hospitalizations are with covid. an unvaccinated teenager risk of hospitalization is one in 100,000. a vaccinated teenager, risk of hos hospitalization is one per million. these are low. and we should take advantage to pull back some of these controls and don t keep them any longer than necessary. dr. matthew, you ve heard him lay out his case, but you re not quite there yet.
were pre-omicron. thanks to all of you for getting up for way too early with us on this thursday morning. morning joe starts right now. translator: greetings, world. it is me, vladimir putin. you may not recognize me because my nipples are covered. i know the international community is skeptical that russia is withdrawing troops, so i app here today to provide evidence. first, as you can see, our military men are retreating from the border. second, we are also removing our equipment as this official footage clearly shows. so there you have it, world. i hope you are happy. well, i mean seriously,