protect us extremely well against severe disease. and ultimately that s the metric that we care about the most. in your washington post column you write the important question for people to ask now as they make their risk calculations is how important is it for you to continue avoiding covid? so explain to us what you mean by that. i think a lot of people have been trying to calculate what is their risk of getting covid at an individual event. and that s really difficult to do. i actually think that a more important question to ask is how much do you want to keep trying to avoid covid? and i m not trying to be cavalier here. of course covid is an extremely serious disease, especially prevaccines. we know that there are people who are still extremely vulnerable to it as well, people who are immunocompromised or elderly as an example. but i think for the majority of individuals who are vaccinated and boosted they are very well protected against severe disease. we also know that abo
vaccinated or boosted and the case of president biden is double boosted, you are highly protected. and at that point i think it is reasonable for people to make different risk calculations. we have great protections from vaccines and therapeutics that are becoming widely available. people are going to come to decisions about what it means for their own behavior collectively from a public health point of view, it is critical we make these things widely available. dr. ashish jha, we ll stay very close in touch with you. thanks for what you are doing and thanks for joining us. thank you, wolf. the john lennon s son, singing his father s classic peaeace for the first time. cooold cuts
Transcripts for CNN Early Start With Christine Romans and Laura Jarrett 20211230 10:00:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
people are trying to figure out how to make these risk calculations as we talk about all the time. there is some pushback againsted new cdc isolation guidelines how long to stay away from people if you actually get covid. dr. fauci says you can still have small gatherings of vaccinated and boosted people together in a home, suggesting about six people is okay, but then he kind of says 40 people isn t. so where do you draw the line? you re right, it s all about risk mitigation. i think that what the guidelines say ten days or five days, the rule should be preventing disease. you want to avoid getting disease. so, you know, six people that you regularly are around that are completely vaccinated that have low risk careers, making good choices, that s probably going to be fine. as that number increases, your risk increases and so you really need to be looking at your own risk factors, your own health, are you fully vaccinated and boosted, what is your job, are you able to work from home,
personally going much of anywhere. we ll go to the grocery store, but not to the gym or anywhere else. we ve got so many staff out who had exposure over the holidays, even with just family and friends, with how easily omicron spreads. i m just not taking chances. christine and i have talked about it, just these constant risk calculations that we re all doing every day. meanwhile, the average case records that are being set every day are just they re astronomical. the numbers in new york are something like 74,000 cases in one day. hospitalizations are up just a bit. but apples to apples, the number of people in the hospital is still about half of what it was at the peak a year ago. obviously we don t want to see hospitalizations go up. so if the numbers stay like this, what does it say to you? you know, laura, you hit the nail on the head. apples to apples, we re actually doing a little better. as we ve been discussing, the omicron variant is like the other variants, but the secon