good evening. it s great to have you with us as we near the end of another week together. we ll get to this ice storm as hitting as we re on the air. j ginger zee standing by on that front. but we ll start with the pandemic. the cdc with strong evidence booster shots do provide strong protection from omicron. two vaccine doses without the booster for 57% effective against hospital devastations, but that the booster shot, a third shot, brings protection back up to 90% against omicron. and people 65 and older who were fully vaccinated and boosted were 90 times less likely to die than unvaccinated people in that age group. this all comes as omicron is still raging across much of the country, and this eye opening number tonight one quarter of all confirmed covid cases since the beginning of this pandemic have been in just the last month. 18 million new cases of covid in