test them again and follow up with them. this is something we desperately need, and i think that will replace the travel ban in short order. so what should americans be doing over the next two to three weeks while they wait to see what this is all snabout. to take a famous line from the real estate business, this is vaccinate, vaccinate, and vaccinate, as has been pointed out, even if you look at the beta and gamma variants we saw earlier in south africa and south america, these are the ones that could evade immune protection. we saw that if you were vaccinated, you still have relatively good protection against serious illness, hospitalizations or death, and so i can t emphasize enough, you know, i don t think alisyn, most people realize we re growing more vulnerable every day in this country, not less, because we have 125 million americans who have now gotten past their six months since they were originally vaccinated and each
united states and really throughout the world. there have been other variants that have not had that same, you know, mortality and even how people were getting it across the united states and the world. what is it that we could or should be doing to prepare to in inoculate, to protect ourselves from this or any other variant that may be coming down the pike in the future? the same thing that we ve been talking about for months. so, one, don t drop your guard, continue to have social distancing, use your masks. i mean, simple little things. vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. i mean, that s extremely important. the more people that are vaccinated, the better off you are. you know that, for example, south africa has only 24% of vaccinated people. so they are going to get in trouble. talk to me about what you re
longer period of time. however, it s in our hands to be able to control this pandemic. the only way to do it is to not drop your guard. it s time to continue to use your mask, keep your social distancing, and vaccinate. vaccination seems to be the one way by which we can actually control this pandemic at this point in time. and make no mistake, there will be many more variants that are going to come in the months to follow. so this is not over. dr. varon, i tell you this and i tell you once if i tell you 1,000 times, i know how hard you work for our communities and many times at your own expense in many ways. so on this day after thanksgiving, i just want to say gracias, thank you for what you do for all of us. thank you so much. up next, what you need to know this black friday as supply
health, msnbc contributor joyce vance, and msnbc political analyst fernand amandi join us in florida. i want to start with alabama. how is the state s hospital system holding up? what worries you most about this new surge? as we know, we have over 2,600 persons currently hospitalized in alabama with covid-19. about 500 of those are on ventilators. currently we have 42 pediatric patients hospitalized. this is pretty significant for us. our health care system is under tremendous strain. we re out of icu beds. we have a federal team on the ground in southwest alabama. we will have another federal team on the ground next week. we re at a critical phase in alabama and we re just urging all alabamians to come together, mitigate, and vaccinate. given that dr. landers, ahead of donald trump s rally in coleman, a city declared a state of emergency as it becomes