moments ago, right here on new day. part of the president s program which he will be speaking about this afternoon is to dramatically increase the availability of testing, putting up about 20,000 testing sites, we re getting half a billion tests very quickly, literally within the next few days. and then have a situation where you can get anywhere from 200 million to half a billion tests per month. so we will be able to very soon have all the tests that people need. president biden will also say in his speech that vaccinated americans don t need to cancel their holiday plans, despite the rise in case counts. cnn s jeremy diamond is live at the white house this morning with more for us. good morning. good morning, erica. president biden will deliver a stark warning once again to unvaccinated americans today, warning them of the potential serious illnesses that they could face amid this omicron surge. he will also seek to reassure those vaccinated americans, particularly
three-quarters of new infections. it is important to note this, this is the big question, how severe of illness does omicron cause? we still don t have complete data on that. have a listen. you obviously want to pay attention to the number of infections because they could be the forerunner of severity. but if you have a lot of infections, and less severity, it is much more important to focus on hospitalizations. and that s where the jury is still out. fauci also emphasized that getting vaccinated and boosted remains a strong defense from severe illness for all of the variants. u.s. has now confirmed its first death from omicron, notably an unvaccinated texas man with underlying health issues died after contracting the virus for a second time. again, note, unvaccinated. right now, cases are surging across the country, forcing some event cancellations, the nhl has suspended all of its games for the next several days over the christmas weekend, in an attempt to slow the spre
First lady told me, i spoke to her after champ died, she said champ would follow us to every room, and so i think he s looking for a companion again and german shepherds provide that for him. they re such good dogs and those ears, they re adorabdorab they re cute. thank you. mm-hmm. berman, i m sure kate will let you know as soon as the cat arrives. i m sure. cnn s coverage continues right now. very good tuesday morning to you. i m jim sciutto. the omicron variant is now already the dominant strain of coronavirus here in the u.s. and it is only been 21 days since the first case of it was detected. take a look at this chart, it shows it visually. the yellow bar shows how delta accounted for nearly 100% of cases, four months until a couple of weeks ago and just in the last two weeks you see omicron shoot up from just a small percentage to now 73%.