on the virus in a way we didn t back in march of 2020. we have surveillance, we now have testing infrastructure, rapid tests, yes, they should be free, all new york city will mail out a million. we also got pcr tests, all of these are getting overwhelmed as happens in an outbreak. we do have testing capacity that gives us some sense of what s going on. we also have quality masks. we know how to take steps to keep ourselves safe, masking in big indoor settings for instance, at-home rapid tests if you can get them before but to an event. also, another really important difference between now and 2020 is there is not a sociopath in charge of the country anymore. donald trump is not in charge anymore. we knew his attitude to the pandemic was shockingly bad. tonight the official congressional investigation into his administration s response to the pandemic is out. the details are absolutely god smacking. one of the committees behind
testing even more accessible to people so they don t have to go through their insurance companies. we need him to talk about how he s going to make the testing infrastructure more robust. we also need to hear how he s going to set ventilation and air infiltration standards for businesses and schools and how he s going to close the gap in terms of vaccination rates because we re still seeing the same inequities we saw at the beginning of the vaccine rollout. we re now seeing with boosters in terms of racial inequities and socioeconomic equities and how we re going to keep workplaces safe as well. i want to hear a layered strategy approach. it cannot be vaccine focused because as we ve seen, we had as many people die since the vaccine rollout since before the vaccine rollout. for those of you who don t follow dr. blackstock on instagram and twitter, she s very generous about sharing her personal interactions on those platforms. dr. blackstock, i was really
immunity anyone thad with previous infection, we were a naive population. one of the reason we can see the cases go up right now with omicron is because we have eyes on the virus in a way we didn t back in march of 2020. we have surveillance because we now have testing infrastructure in place. we have rapid tests. yes, they should be free, and available to all. new york city is going to mail out, i think, about a million but we ve got pcr tests. all of these are getting overwhelmed as happens in an outbreak but we have testing capacity that gives us a sense of what s going on. we have quality masks, we know how to take steps to keep ourselves safe, masking in big indoor settings, for instance, at home rapid tests, if you can get them before you go to an event. also, another really important difference between now and 2020 is there s not a sociopath in charge of the country anymore. donald trump is not in charge anymore. we knew his attitude to the pandemic was shockingly bad but tonigh
those case numbers rising very rapidly is not going to be followed by a sort of comparable increase in hospitalizations and deaths. i m hoping that we finally break the link between infections and hospitalizations and deaths because we have so many people vaccinated. last point, i remain worried, a lot of americans are still not vaccinated, a lot of older, high risk people still not boosted. they remain at risk. that s the group to pay attention to and figure out how we help them get through this. john. dr. jha let me ask you a question here, i live in new york city and people are freaking out here, you know, in a way that i don t even remember people being as freaked out by when delta hit as they are over this. you see the testing infrastructure here is under strain, people are lined up at testing facilities all over the city, and i think there is this question that people have with one of these things obviously
available testing for the entirety of this pandemic, and we still have not done it right. why? right. so i think for many reasons. we ve had a chronically underfunded public health system that was one reason, and we treated testing especially rapid tests as sort of a medical tool when it s a public health tool. it doesn t need to go through the fda and bureaucracy of that sort of approval process. that s one reason. we also don t have a robust testing infrastructure. that speaks to how decentralized our health care system is. we still are behind almost two years out and we know that testing is one of those very important mitigation layers that is needed, because if someone techts positive, then they know to isolate. they know to tell people around them to quarantine. obviously that s not happening, because we don t have that infrastructure in place and people are still waiting three, four, five days to get their pcr results back and that unacceptable. especially if this thing is