Significant. And this call for schools to implement regular testing. Talk us through what youre hearing from sources. Reporter hallie, obviously, this is shaping up to be a pretty significant speech from the president after a summer in which he had hoped we would be looking at the downslope of the Covid19 Pandemic and focus on other issues, but instead the Delta Variant changed those plans. White house officials are casting this speech as sort of everything theyve been trying to do, but bigger and bolder. One of those specifically already has to do with something the president himself did a couple of months ago. We talked about in july when the president ordered federal agencies to require a Vaccine Requirement on their staff or give them an option short of a vaccine of doing regular attestation of their negative status from covid19. What the president is expected to do today sign an executive order, directing those federal agencies to give up that second option. You have to be vaccina
On florida. Search and rescue operations will resume when the site is deemed safe. Officials are hoping that the demolition will open a new portion of the site to search teams. No one has been found alive since immediately after the collapse. 24 confirmed deaths with 121 people still unaccounted for. Natasha chen joins us from surfside, florida. Nat natasha . Reporter that space between these buildings there where you see that blue gray sky is where the building used to be. It is no longer there this morning. That demolition happened at 10 30 Last Night. Residents in the vicinity were asked to stay indoors, to keep windows and doors closed, to keep that Dust Cloud and debris outside of their homes. As you mentioned, this is expected to help Search And Rescue teams actually access about a third of the pile they couldnt get to before because it was too close to the structurally unstable remaining building. But as we know, sometimes demolitions can be spectacles, shows. Representative Deb
there is good news, both new york and new jersey are not seeing a drastic increase in hospitalizations just yet. a few minutes ago, we spoke to a hospital official here in new york who says stay calm. this isn t 2020. he says they still have plenty of hospital capacity. telling you it is not a crisis. those are good things to hear. president biden, meantime, later today, he s going to lay out a new strategy to fight the covid resurgence. this strategy centering on testing. the president will announce the purchase of half a billion rapid tests along with a plan to distribute the tests, free of charge, to americans who request them. his other important message, fully vaccinated americans don t need to cancel their holiday plans despite the rising case count. joining us now, dr. peter how t hotez, dean of the national school of tropical medical at baylor college of medicine. always good to see you. let s start with what we re going to hear today from the president. 500 milli
troubling poll numbers as his agenda is stalling right now. there is little hope of his sweeping spending plan passing the senate before the end of the year as well as voting rights legislation. so what is his party s plan? we re going to ask the number one two democrat in the u.s. senate, dick durbin. we want to welcome our viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer and you re in the situation room. announcer: this is cnn breaking news. let s get state to the breaking pandemic news. president biden underscoring in very stark terms the threat posed by the coronavirus variant to millions of unvaccinated americans. omicron has not yet spread as fast as it would have otherwise done and that has happened in europe, but it is here now and it is spreading and it is going to increase. for the unvaccinated, we re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated. for themselves and their families an the hospitals they ll soon
let s go outfront. good evening, i m erin burnett. outfront tonight, a covid death every minute. this is where we are tonight. about every 60 seconds, another american is dying of covid. that is the grim reality we are in the united states. covid again tightening its grip on the country. today president biden meeting with his top health officials and he had this warning about the highly contagious omicron variant. it s here now and it s spreading and it s going to increase. for unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if you re unvaccinated. for themselves, their families and the hospitals they ll soon overwhelm. it is a sobering warning and cases are increasing incredibly fast in vaccinated and unvaccinated. take new york city. the number of those testing positive doubled from december 9th to the 12th. doubled in three days. the mayor s health advisor tweeting we ve never seen this before in new york city. and the rush of new cases is having