vaccination. and we know vaccination helps address omicron. reporter: still undecided on whether crowds will fill times square for new year s eve. as covid infections have upended the worlds of sports and entertainment forcing saturday night live to cancel its live audience. the nba, nhl also postponing games and schools like harvard university moving graduate and professional schools to online classes for the first three weeks of january. health workers and government officials increasingly focused on boosters. we see those who are vaccinated, those who received their booster, aren t coming into the hospital at the same rates. reporter: moderna today announcing preliminary data shows its half dose booster shot increased antibody levels against omicron. noting that a larger size dose raised them even more. the company says it s working on variant specific boosters as well. right now, you need that third dose. i wish we d stop calling it a
into the winter. reporter: america, bracing for a tough winter that s beginning to look a lot like last winter. already in the midst of a delta surge, the new omicron variant accounting for just under 3% of cases. but spreading fast. this virus is extraordinary. it has a doubling time of anywhere from 2 to 3 days. it s going to take over. reporter: the u.s. now averaging about 1200 deaths a day and 130 new covid-19 cases a day. that figure up 10% from a week ago. hospitalizations nationwide up 35% over last month. and intensive care unit beds nearly 80% full. cases rising much faster in parts of the midwest, the south and the northeast. new york setting a record for new cases for the third day in a row on sunday. new york city an early epicenter of the pandemic seeing a spike in cases officials say is being driven by omicron. we have to move faster. that s why we re focused more on
weekend shows that if left unchecked, infections in denmark could be ten times that number, followed by record high hospital admissions by christmas and well beyond in the new year. charles is the epidemiologist in charge of managing the risk of new variants in denmark, a country blessed with more than three quarters of its population double vaccinated. but dans are quickly discovering that two shots are no match for the new more infectious variant. and the booster shot program simply cannot keep up. denmark has among the highest rates of testing and sequencing in the world, and has ream data at its fingertips. there are some thoughts omicron could be less severe than delta, they don t know how much less severe. t. doesn t matter if omicron is half as dangerous as delta or less dangerous as delta because if many, many thousand or tens of thousands are testing positive the same day, then the
whether they cannot cope with any more restrictions, only 10% say that they cannot do that. so there is no real sign of fatigue yet. it sound like danes are rule followers. to a large extent, we are rule followers, but it is not sort of blind obedience. it is because we feel that we are being explained why we need to do it and what we need to do. reporter: his research found americans followed covid rules to a lesser extent than danes, but omicron won t hit the u.s. any less hard. i think that we will be facing very tough times across the world with omicron. and the only thing that we can hope of is then that the severity of the disease will be mild enough that the health systems are not being overwhelmed. omicron infections are also
charge of the trump investigations. the incoming manhattan da talks exclusively to cnn. welcome to the lead. i m pamela brown in for jake tapper. we start with the health lead and covid cases spiking across the u.s. we re now averaging 130,000 every day. that s up 10% in a week. hospitalizations are also up about 35% in the last month. with about 1 in 5 of all icu beds in this country taken up by a covid patient. health officials warn the highly contagious omicron variant will soon be responsible for most cases. but for now, it s that other superspreader, the delta variant, driving this december surge. athena jones reports drugmaker moderna has encouraging news about its boosters and the fight against omicron. it is going to be a tough few weeks to months as we get deeper