the department of health to try to get more testing supplies here in miami-dade county. john? 150,000 tests and already out. the demand is there, we got to increase the supply. leyla, thank you very much. on top of that, there is new government data on the pandemic that will be of concern to parents. the cdc and health and human services departments say the number of children in the hospital with covid-19 is getting close to a peak that was reached in early september. new york city is reporting a fivefold increase in pediatric hospitalizations and for more on that let s get to cnn s senior medical correspondent elizabeth cohen and, so, elizabeth, parents obviously are watching this closely, but you say they should not be panicking just yet. right. and the reason why is that these numbers are still really small. they re still a very small number of children who are ending up in the hospital, thank goodness, with omicron. the concern is that these numbers are getting bigger and let
christmas eve and that s with testing shortages. and none of the data includes results from those at-home covid tests. the nation overall is averaging 200,000 new cases each day right now. also concerns are growing around the risks for children. there s still a lot we don t know about the severity of omicron and people without immunity like kids who haven t been vaccinated. what we do know is the number of child hospitalizations for covid have quadrupled in new york city in recent weeks. nbc s mike memoli is traveling with the president in delaware. also with us is an epidemiologist from fielding school of public health. mike, we ll start with you in delaware. what did president biden say about what he s doing to shore up testing supplies and hospital resources? reporter: the president touched down here in delaware in the last hour.
guarding public health, right. when you re watching what s happening now with these extremely long testing lines, and of course president biden admitting he wishes he would have sent these tests several months before, we re in year three, coming into year three of the pandemic, did the biden administration drop the ball on this at least when it comes to testing? well, you know, they were focusing on vaccines. we clearly put billions of dollars into testing supplies and capacity, and yes, we need to do it more on testing. frankly, speaker pelosi was running around a year ago saying testing, testing, testing. we always knew that these all were related, and i think the biden administration is doing what it needs to do, and that is to get testing ing kits out to individuals around the country and to make them accessible and affordable. three weeks ago i could buy all the testing kits i wanted.
other people or highly vulnerable people, and also layer these measures, not just use one and put all your eggs in one basket, like vaccines. use those masks in combination with tests and your vaccine and you ll be a lot safer. speaking of tests, as you know the variant has spread which means the need for testing as certainly skyrocketed. the white house plans to distribute half a million tests free of charge to americans. but the need for the test is immediate. should the administration have been better prepared to handle this particular need? what could they have done? i m going to say yes, they should have been better prepared. we ve known about this virus for two years. we ve known about our shortages on tests and testing supplies for two years. we have done a lot to ramp up the production of tests over the last two years. unfortunately some of that effort was downscaled or scaled back this last summer when we declared victory too soon. so i think there s a lot more the adminis
nowadays, still doesn t necessarily mean getting them in a bed. they sit in the er. most folks are sitting there up to 12 or 24 hours. we ve been at this for six weeks. people holding for hours and days on end, people delaying their definitive care they need in the hospital, and the hospital sorry, er nurses acting as in-patient nurses while still trying to manage the flow of er patients. it s a real challenge. from what you re seeing, do hospitals have what they need to get through this? we re hearing about some hospitals need manager antibodies. other clinics are short on testing supplies. what does michigan need right now? well, certainly michigan is short on antibodies. our system, we keep whittling down the people who qualify. you have to be over a certain bmi. you have to have certain risk factors and within seven days of symptoms. it s based on that. if you re a vaccinated person, you don t qualify.