it s the top of the hour, so glad you re with us. i m poppy harlow, thank you for joining me on newsroom. we re going to hear from the white house. the white house covid task force is going to give a live update on the surge we re seeing in the united states right now. this comes hours after the approval of a potential game changing first in the pandemic, a pill to treat covid. the fda just today giving emergency authorization to pfizer s antiviral pixilvid, as the united states is seeing a 4% rise in hospitalizations from just a week ago, and now detecting omicron in 26 states 22 days after the first reported case in the country. a top researcher in south africa says the country is beyond its peak of omicron, saying south africa is seeing a serious decline in cases in the area where it was first detected. that is potentially good news for the word, the first pill to treat covid, how well does it work? it works quite well, and it s something you can take home. the doctor ca
People should move on with their lives with precautions. i wish he would go further to restrict the activities of the unvaccinated. they re the ones still spreading covid, and prolonging the pandemic for all of us. we re seeing the vaccine mandates, et cetera, certainly charged all the way up through the courts. challenged, i should say. dr. rodriguez, just to build on the question that dr. wen raises, which is what is omicron going to show us? will there be a decoupling between infections and hospitalizations? the data out of south africa just highlighted in the washington post today is really interesting, right, that they re saying the surge that they saw in omicron cases is now completely dwindling, they might be going down the other side of the mountain, but the qualifier is they know 70% of people in south africa have had some variant of covid, so maybe
Protected and their immune systems built up from that. so does that mean we cannot exactly read good news out of south africa as good news for us here? well, i think we can be hopeful about that news. you brought up one point is the fact that a lot of people there have already come into contact with some form of covid, and may have a natural immunity to it. i want to caution people not to take too much heed in sort of so solace from that. south africa is not the united states. they re more homogeneous in their population, and in their politics, if you will, which n makes a difference in this country. their population tend to skew a little bit longer than in the u.s., which may be why they re not seeing as many people hospitalized. if you re looking at it as a whole, the data for the vaccinated whether it s omicron or delta, is the fact, and let s keep hammering this home, people that are vaccinated will get less sick, will be hospitalized
Multilayered comprehensive process, the hallmark of which is vaccination. now, one of the questions that dr. walensky and i and d dr. murthy and others get asked frequently, right now as we get to the christmas holiday, and new year s, would it be safe for individuals who are vaccinated, who are boosted, to get together with family in the setting of the home. the answer to that is yes. an extra level of protection would be the testing that dr. walensky measured, but i want to make sure this is not confused with going to a large gathering. and there are many of these, parties that have 30, 40, 50 people, in which you do not know the vaccination status of individuals. those are the kind of functions in the context of covid and particularly in the context of omicron, that you do not want to go to. so to the extent possible, we urge you to stay away from those
Average of deaths are about 1,200 per day, which is an increase of 3.5% over the prior week. over the past several weeks, cdc has continued to closely monitor the emergence of the omicron variant. currently over 85 countries have detected omicron and on monday we released updated data for the united states, which estimates that the omicron variant represents approximately 73% of covid-19 cases in the united states. and in some areas of the country, omicron has increased even further. accounting for an estimated 90% of cases in the eastern atlantic states, parts of the midwest, south, and northern pacific states. this rapid increase and the proportion of omicron circulating around the country is similar to what we ve seen around the world. although this is a reminder of continued threat of covid-19 variants, this increase in omicron proportion is what we