sadness. is there any reason to be optimistic here? if look at new york city and washington, d.c., two of the places where omicron started to surge first, the new york city case count down 23% from the first of the year, the d.c. case count down 13% from the first of the year. is that evidence to you that in the places where omicron hit first it is cresting and receding and that perhaps in the week or two ahead we will see that elsewhere? yeah. we are seeing some signs of hope that there are some places that look like they might just be getting beyond the peak and actually in these places there was a clear decoupling between infections and hospitalizations, that, yes, you did see hospitals in these places become at capacity or over capacity but at the same time there was a huge spike in cases and those cases that we re aware of, that s a huge undercount because of the rapid tests that are not being part of the official total and many people not being able to access tests so i am opti
2,000 americans, 2,033 lost their lives on sunday to covid. so the death count continues to go up. from a regional perspective, you get what dr. fauci is talking about. the northeast, where omicron hit first is starting to come down, the midwest, a blue urges a plateau, south a plateau, maybe a beginning of a diplomat there. drove megan ranney is here. if you re looking at it in a distance, yes, yes, things look better, but you re in the emergency room every day. we ve been down this road trying to declare victory and then having it snapped from is in the last minute. i hesitate to say this is done.
guard members have been deployed. in all but one state. health care systems in many areas face critical staffing shortages amid the surge. joining us to discuss, dr. jonathan rider. good to have you back. i also do my best to be a glass half full guy. when you look at the data in a police like d.c. and new york, where omicron hit first, the surge is already tailing off. it s coming down and burning fast like we saw in other places like south africa. as you look at the data in your view, has the surge already peaked in some parts of the country? well, in d.c., we were among the first to see omicron, and if you look at daily cases are now clearly beginning to drop in the district of columbia and in northern virginia and maryland. the problem is that hospitalizations lag several days behind case counts so our hospitals are still packed. and we are super short on staff both from the chronic staffing shortages that we ve seen over
about the 60% that s, quote, fully immunized which means two doses, so, again, we have to do a hard court press about boosting again, and even then, john, this is all best case scenario because we are seeing, according to imperial college london, some waning after even getting that booster. so that s going to be the next big issue that we re going to have to tackle, but for now let s focus on getting everybody boosted. when you talk about the next big issue. we ll get into the details in just a few minutes. the reap it s so urgent is because of this. on the one hand you can look at cases by region and i bring this up right now and if you look at where omicron hit first which is the northeast, the yellow line, you do start to see cases going down. still at 100,000 a day in that reg op, still a big number and down from the peak. if you look at the south where you lived, the numbers are high. midwest, they are still significantly high as they go that way. well, omicron hit first in the