dr. fauci s message was clearly, please, go out and get vaccinated. vaccinations are up, if you look at the numbers, but most of these are boosters. what is more important right now with the dual threat if you have delta or omicron? is it to get those who are vaccinated a booster shot, and as you noted, shrink the wait period for that, or to get the completely unvaccinated to get a shot? i m not sure if we can place importance on one thing over the other. when it comes to fighting covid and combatting this pandemic, all the different things, vaccines, boosters, masks, social distancing, these are all tools in our arsenal and we have to employ all of them in order to be able to win this war against covid-19. so i asked you this question last time ump you were here, i going to ask it again. based on what you know today, what should people be thinking about in terms of holiday travel, holiday gathering? you know, those thoughts change day to day. i particularly had plans to
states within a month of being discovered. there is still a lot about omicron we just don t know. if you come through, if you look at cases in the united states right now, we re just around 120,000 cases, 119,888. back on november 14, that was 80,000, so it s up 60% since last month and most of this is delta. are you worried that as omicron starts to double as we have seen in south africa, as we ve seen in london quickly, that this number will go even higher as we go more into winter? absolutely. when delta emerged, it was the most transmissible variant we had seen to date and omicron is quickly taking that title. it has become the most dominant strain in stoutouth africa and most dominant strain in the u.k. as of today. the u.k. is seeing cases they hadn t even seen in the winter surge, so yes, i m worried we ll experience the same as what s happening in europe.
week was 0.4% cases. as the cases climb and the holidays collide with covid exha exhaustion. we are in a war now between the delta variant and omicron variant as to who will become king of the hill. how quickly is the virus doubling in terms of its proportion? with delta, it was doubling every couple weeks, this seems to be doubling every few days. it s pretty clearly more transmissible. there is a lot of moving parts to this very, very fast-moving epidemic here in the united states, and i think we have to take it very seriously. we re going to try to curtail the spread of omicron very seriously, and at the same time, we re trying to educate people that we re going to have to live with covid. there maybe other variants down the road and we ll have to adjust what we re doing along
vaccine or two months after the johnson & johnson to get a booster. that s one issue. the other part we re not looking at is although the boosters and vaccines may protect against disease, they do that at a less efficacious rate than the prior variants. when we have a higher caseload, even though less people are becoming ill, when the numbers start to spike, that still causes a strain in the health system. three out of four teams have had to postpone games because of covid. cornell one of four college campuses saying they re going to partially shift things online. omicron is only 3% of the cases. even when we have to deal with delta, how do you do that juggle? it s hard to juggle. we don t know exactly what we re dealing with. keep in mind omicron was discovered a little under three weeks ago and we re already seeing it in 77 countries and 36
dr. rechita mccain is here. doctor, i want to make a point. delta is driving the case surge right now, and they say, why are we so obsessed about omicron? there was 0.4% a week ago, now there s almost 3%. by sunday it was 43,33, then moy it was 44%, now 50%. are you okay with just getting a booster, or do we need a vaccine? the problem there is not everybody is eligible for a booster. you have to wait for six months after the pfizer or moderna