and the world health organization has openly criticized governments that have taken the fast bans that may not work and also may discriminate against some countries afflicted by this. give us your take on that. secondly, the great question that a lot of americans have is how will my vaccination stand up against this new variant? what do we know, and when will we know more? right. to answer your first question, you know, south africa has a very robust surveillance program. that s why they were one of the first countries to pick up this new variant. we don t necessarily know whether or not it originated there, but they were being a global citizen and sharing this information in a transparent way with the rest of the world. so the concern is that the travel ban may end up penalizing countries for being transparent and generous with their genomics surveillance and information. the other issue is this has been deemed a variant of concern by
i think at least on the diagnostic testing side, we should be well prepared to handle it. joining us now, founder and ceo of advancing health equity, dr. uché blackstock. she s an msnbc contributor. thank you for always being here. news of the new variant broke over the holiday weekend. it was met with a sense of here we go again and real fears with words of at least the early thought that this might be a very transmissible new strain and questions about how effective the vaccines will be against it. so it seems like we won t know that for at least a couple of weeks some of in the meantime for the average americans or people around the world wanting to show, what steps should be taken right now to prevent the spread of this new variant? good morning, jonathan. thanks, again, for having me back on. obviously we know the travel bans have been put into place. to be honest, travel bans are not that effective because by the time they re instituted, the
uncertainty. certainly black friday is considered one of the biggest shopping days of the year. tell us what the supply chain issues, what impact they may have had that day, but also how they loom going forward a little less than a month till christmas. we were setting up for a little bit of a frustrating time for some shoppers. that s indeed what s played out. people going into stores couldn t get the products they wanted in some cases. in other cases, they had to pay up for the bring ledge, just driving. some prices. retailers have been urged to keep inventory high. americans have not completed their shopping at this stage. i mentioned the bottleneck. there are concerns of fresh restrictions on the back of the new variant, people may revert to old behaviors, buying more stuff and that could exacerbate the shortages and drive up prices, jonathan. cnbc s karen tso live from london. thank you so much.
chain bottleneck that that s going to be exacerbated around the situation variant, jonathan. the biden administration has ordered new travel restrictions from south africa and several other countries. other nations are putting in place their own restrictions. how are businesses, particularly the travel industry, reacting to this news? well, if you think about the thanksgiving weekend, we re setting up for pre-pandemic levels of val yums. there are hopes around long haul. you talk about the shutdown of southern african nations. others are taking that action, but we ve got new measures in place more broadly for other travelers. think about the uk. this is a destination americans are coming back to. you ve got pcr tests. that s another hurdle for travel. and people in switzerland. long-haul travel, there s
indoors. we had thanksgiving travel. there s more coming. where do we stand right now at this moment in the pandemic? you know, jonathan, it feels like a bad dream. it feels like the beginning of our fifth delta surge. we re still having about 100,000 case as day, a thousand deaths a day. and then to have this other possible variant, we need to figure is this going to compete with the delta variants? regardless, we need to double down. we know we have a toolbox full of tools that are incredibly effective, and it doesn t have to be bad. it doesn t have to be bad. we can save lives, we just need to make sure we put policies and resources in place to protect americans and the rest of the world. dr. uché blackstock, we really appreciate those wise words. we ll talk to you again soon as we follow this new variant. still ahead, we ll go live to cnbc for an early look at