i m alison morris in for craig melvin. we prepare to ring in the new year, and the number of covid cases raging across the country. for the second day in a row the u.s. is shattering its own record with more than 584,000 cases on thursday. plus in colorado fast-moving wildfires have destroyed nearly 600 homes. look at that. and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate. the governor declaring a state of emergency and president biden warning russian president vladimir putin to deescalate tensions with ukraine during a phone call on thursday, saying if moscow takes military action yrks the u.s. and its allies will respond decisively. we begin this hour with the coronavirus. the number of cases skyrocketing. over 54 million covid cases in the u.s. since the pandemic started. that s according to the latest nbc news tally. the faa is warning of more airline delays today because of the omicron variant and the weather. saying that an increased number of faa employees have tes
homes. south side of lewisville had catastrophic losses as well, dozens of homes. damage assessment is continuing today. we won t have final numbers until late tonight or tomorrow, but we fully expect this to be 500 or more homes lost. the fire burnt in an interesting dynamic with mosaics. you can see how the wind and topography drove it certain directions, devastated some neighborhoods and blocks and left neighbors standing and intact. i know residents want to get back to their homes as soon as possible to assess damage. in many of those neighborhoods that are blocked off, it is still too dangerous to return. we saw still active fire in many places this morning and we saw down power lines and a lot of risk that we re trying to mitigate. as soon as residents are able to get back, we re going to let them back. that s our goal. don t want to keep people out of their neighborhoods or their homes. last night there was a boil water announced for city of lewisville. that now extend
Forcing it to proceed without the benefit of documents which it needs to do its work. happy new year to you my hard working friend. thank you so much. thank you. that does it for me on this busy last day of 2021. catch me on nbc news now, weekdays, 3:00 p.m. eastern. coming up now. an update from officials on wildfires. my colleague picks up coverage. hi, everybody. let s go right to officials briefing on the wildfire near denver. we certainly did not lose 2,000 homes. we did see entire subdivisions as i talked about last night, west side of superior, that are totally gone. that accounts for easily 500 homes. west of superior out towards marshall, colorado springs area, we saw dozens of burned out