is going to save lives and make this country a better place. is the president open to or interested many moving toward a vaccine requirement for domestic flights? you know, as dr. fauci said and something we always look at, we have got these two vaccine requirements headed to the supreme court on january 7th. i think our plan is to see what the court does on those. i think that you know, there s little evidence that the virus is being spread by people while they are on airplanes. people are masked on planes, but we ll continue to look at this and see if it s something we need to do to fight the virus. right now, i think our focus is on those two vaccine mandates requirements coming before the supreme court on january 7th. they cover about 100 million people. i think it would be a significant step forward in protecting the public. omicron feels like this nightmare scenario and i take your point about hospitalizations. it gives me a great deal of sol
larks but the news about pediatric hospitalizations is shocking and saddening and terrifying for everyone. and the pace at which omicron seems to take down, i don t know how many folks are out of your workplace, but at mine, it feels like designated survivor to be one of the humans walking around these halls. i wonder if you can just take me inside the early days of really your beginning to understand sort of the size and scope of this country s omicron wave. yeah, i think right after thanksgiving, right when we got the word about omicron being identified in southern africa, we got to work on stepping up the things we would need for a challenge of this scale. what you haven t seen, you saw last winter, reports of hospitals without masks or gloves or key gear. we ve gotten that gear to the hospitals. also as the president announced, stepped up deployments of military doctors and nurses to hospitals all over this country to help them deal with the
unrelated. all that said, it s important, because it means that about half of the patients with covid may have been here anyway. and when it comes to the hospitalizations as a metric in terms of hospital strain, it s not as indicative as you might think, because i do think we would have seen these patients regardless of the omicron surge at least about 50% of them or so. how would you this idea of omicron being less severe, what have you noticed with the unvaccinated versus the vax knitted on omicron? 75% of patients with covid in our hospital are completely unvaccinated. not had a single dose. about 25% are fully vaccinated but do not have a booster. and we have almost no patients who have had a booster. hands down, omicron may be less mild on average from person to person, but because it s so transmissible, it s getting to a lot of people in the community who are vulnerable so hospitals are seeing a lot of admissions because of that. vax nax does matter.
back on. doctor, is it time for mandates to be lifted considering what we re seeing? well, we are saying a downtrend in cases almost all across the country. the thing about omicron being so infectious is a lot of people were infected. it s likely the case will continue to climb because the virus doesn t have that many new places to go. do we know masks are effective add preventing transmission? yes. on an individual level, absolutely. it will protect you. if you feel safer wearing a mask, go ahead. i think the writing is on the wall as case rates start to go down, there s a lot of pressure to pull back on the mask mandates and i don t think that will change very much regardless of what public health experts might advise. i m so interested in this national waste water study. words i never thought i d say. there s this national waste
given anti virals, we know if you give anti virals early in an illness you can substantially reduce the risk of severe disease. so any person of that age, who is through their age more at risk of severe disease, you would be wanting to give them anti virals quite early on. give them anti-virals quite early on. , ., , , on. even if they have been triple vaccinated on. even if they have been triple vaccinated and on. even if they have been triple vaccinated and we on. even if they have been triple vaccinated and we were - on. even if they have been triple vaccinated and we were hearing | on. even if they have been triple - vaccinated and we were hearing from nicholas witchell that the assumption is that of course the queen has been trouble vaccinated? you would say anti virals would still be required quite early on? certainly, that is my view, yes. talk to is generally about omicron, as a variant. when it does infect older people, i mean, we talked generally about omicron being man