well. back to discuss this is dr. megan ranney. you heard from the doctors saying this does appear to be less severe in children. that s good news. it s terrific news. the messaging from dr. fauci and dr. walensky i thought was tremendously clear. the takeaways are omicron, particularly for those of us who are vaccinated, is not as severe as prior variants of covid. that s part of what makes right now different from 2020. but if you re unvaccinated you re still at risk. no one wants to get covid. wear a good mask if you re out and about. i really applaud the administration both on purchasing more of that paxlovid and on scaling up and national guard. as an er doc, i can tell you how desperately short staffed
these four steps, get vaccinated and get boosted if you re eligible, wear a mask, stay home when you re sick and take a test if you have symptoms or are looking for greater, extra reassurance before you gather with others. with that, thank you. i will now turn things over to dr. fauci. thank you very much, dr. walensky. what i d like to do over the next couple minutes is talk about the omicron variant and some concerns particularly in the area of severity of disease, if i can have the first slide. i m going to focus predominantly on severity, but let me make a few comments to underscore many of the things that dr. walensky said. first of all, without a doubt, unequivocally, we are dealing with a highly, highly transmissible variant that spreads rapidly. the data are overwhelming in that regard. number two, immune evasion. oechl cron evades vaccine
protection against symptomatic disease and to some extent severe disease. however, as underscored by dr. walensky again, laboratory and clinical data indicate that booster shots reconstitute vaccine protection even against omicron. let s spend a moment now on severity of disease which is less likely that omicron will cause severe disease, i m going to give you data from four separate sources just to underscore that, but then to end with a caveat. next slide. these are data from south africa. if you look at the three variants in blue, red and yellow with omicron being yellow and take a look at admissions, oxygen necessity, severe disease and death, in each case the yellow bar is significantly less than the red and the blue bar which represent beta and delta. next slide. if you look at data from the
larger numbers of children being hospitalized, again mostly among the unvaccinated. about vaccination, just to refresh your memory, the pfizer biontech is authorized and recommended for children from 5-17. children from 12-17 can get a booster. the fda authorized 12-15, as dr. walensky said. today the acip will meet about that for recommendation. finally, a question that many ask, and i m sure many of the reporters who have children are asking this. what about kids from six months to 5 years? those studies are on going now to get the right dose and regimen to get to where we want to be, and likely the clinical trial are on going in individuals less than five years, hopefully in the first half, hopefully towards the earlier part of the first half we may have some information so that we can vaccinate children
decrease hospitalizations and deaths and are a game-changer with the potential to impact the outcome of covid on people and our nation. bottom line, we have the tools we need to manage the surge in omicron cases. with that i ll turn it over to dr. walensky. thank you, jeff, and good morning everyone. i d like to start by walking you through today s state that. current seven-day daily average is about 491,700 cases per day, an increase of about 98% from the previous week. the seven-day average of hospital admissions is about 14,800 per day, an increase of about 63% over the previous week. the seven-day average of daily deaths are about 1,200 per day, which is an increase of about 5% over the prior week. over the last several weeks and over the holidays we have seen a significant and rapid increase in covid-19 cases. this increase reflects both