Has become. And going home with gold. The olympic flame extinguished in tokyo. How american athletes, especially american women, stole the show. Im Phil Mattingly in washington in for fredricka whitfield. Right now, the Covid Pandemic is surging in the u. S. And shows no signs of slowing down. To know how bad it is, all you have to do is look at the numbers. The average number of daily cases has increased nine fold since july, the Delta Variant fuelling this rise in cases and overwhelming hospitals in many states. Hospital even more troubling is how this variant is affecting children. Childhood and teen cases have jumped 84 in the past week. Despite those numbers, only half of the country is vaccinated. Health officials say the drive is because of the unvaccinated which make up most of the hospitalizations and deaths were seeing now. We would not be in the place we are in right now with this Delta Surge if we had been more effective in getting everybody to take advantage of these imnai
The Tokyo Olympics get under way this week, but there is already a growing number of athletes and officials testing covid positive or being forced to self isolate. In the olympic village, two players and a coach for the south africa Mens Football Team have the virus. Eight members of Team Gb Athletics team are also in isolation after being in close contact with positive cases. And us Tennis Player Coco gauff has announced she is not going to tokyo after testing positive. Despite the worsening Covid Situation and strong public opposition to the games, the governor of tokyo has told the bbc it would have been worse to cancel. From tokyo, Rupert Wingfield hayes reports. With five days to go, the anti olympic protests are not going away. This one is outside the hotel where Ioc President Thomas Bach is staying. Their message to him is pretty blunt. Over at the olympic village, Three Covid cases have now been confirmed. Across the city, 1,400 new cases on saturday. Despite this, when i sat d
for america and for our allies thousands of miles away. plus, a pair of courtroom dramas playing out right now, one in new york where donald trump s are fraud trial is pushing ahead, albeit without the former president in attendance. and in georgia where his former attorney sidney powell says there s proof she had nothing to do with breaching local elections equipment, accusing prosecutors of holding back information this whole time. but there s yet another twist, and witnesses in oregon say they literally could not believe what they were seeing, a small plane making a deadly plunge into a home packed with people. we ll explain what happened later in the show. but we begin with congress at a crossroads, testing the notion of whether a government created for and by the american people is truly up to the task, with the speakership vacant and no clear path forward, the basic functioning of government is now in question, whether we can pay our bills, avoid a government shutdo