ongoing investigation into this violent crime spree that took place. and a lot of what the information that s coming out in the past 24 hours has been tied to what happened. now, the next step, jim, is going to be looking into why. cnn s omar jimenez, thanks for staying on top of that. i am jim acosta. thanks very much for watching. erin burnett outfront starts right now. good eke, i m poppy harlow in for erin burnett. out front ton tonight, breaking news. a new record high number of covid cases. seven-day average now topping 256,000. that is the highest that number has ever been in the nearly two year long pandemic. the previous high, nearly 252,000 in january. so far, hospitalizations and deaths have not seen a similar increase in pace, but there are concerning signs.
hospitalizations from the delta wave that never sort of subsided. and now it sort of moving northeast, we ve also got the staffing issues. here in new york city, got a lot of staff in new york city hospitals that are tight that are testing positive. basically you can t search a circuit that s been burned out. and there s simply no few zeke that can fix the fact that we re fried. there s just a certain level of constraint that s going to make this difficult either way. even if that real world data is encouraging in terms of severe illness. right, in march 2020, like i wrote we were worried about ventilators. right now i m worried about nurses. it s a lot harder to make a nurse than to make a ventilator. and a hospital bed is just a bed without a good nurse by insight. let s talk about price of