after his time as vice president. sources tell cnn that it is possible that more searches elsewhere may happen. also that the white house is shifting into damage control. sources say president biden is growing frustrated by how the saga has played out. he cannot escape the questions about the timing of publicly disclosing the classified documents when some of the first pages were initially discovered in november. once again, today, the president chose not to take reports questions. [ inaudible ]. cnn s mj lee is at the white house. a spokesman for the white house counsel is defending the communication and strategy so far. tell us about that. yeah. victor and alisyn, we just wrapped up a lengthy phone call, a press call, with reporters ta that the white house counsel s spokesperson held trying to offer a robust defense of how the white house has handled all of this so far including sort of the timing of the disclosure of information and sort of the decision to wait to d
And alisyn, we are seeing hospitalization rates slightly increase, but as you mentioned, victor, we re far below what we ve seen in previous winter surges. here s a look at that. we should have a chart looking at the past two years of hospitalization rates. you see, starting january 27th of 2021, there s a spike right there, and then as we keep going, we enter 2022, there was another spike in the middle of the chart, but at the end of the chart is where we are today, and you see how we are seeing a slight increase, but we re not nearly as high as those previous surges. that s what s welcome news. we are seeing this across the country. we should have a map showing all states, here state by state differences and hospitalization differences. here s the same map of last year. january 17th of 2022. this same map last year as you see here, there were some high hospitalization rates across various states but the map looks very different today. that s what s welcome news here.
Response to the virus became politicized. i d like you to look forward for a minute. what is our future with the coronavirus? are we going to is it going to come in waves? are we going to have new variants? how do you see our future? well, let s be very clear, we know surges will continue, variants will continue to evolve, because both natural infection and our current vaccines don t protect against reinfection for long periods of time. so we need to work on a very durable vaccine. at the same time, we need to accept the fact that natural infection does not protect you completely. use that data so that everyone knows what s happening in their community. let s accept what s happening. let s accept right now that we know when surges occur. we ve had two summer surges, two winter surges, and we ve had
Dramatically change how we respond to the pandemic and any potential fall, winter surges and the next pandemic. i would temper expectations, though. we ve trialed other therapeutics over the course of the last 18 months and nothing has worked out aside from steroids and severe critical illness from covid. so i would temper expect eggs that this is a short term play and this is a wise area for investment. you have emphasized in the past how important it is for young people to get vaccinated and raising questions for families in this country and around the world. do you express concerns to make young people and their family members less likely to get the vaccine? no, i don t, because we just have to over communicate and provide anticipatory guidance to parents and to young men who predominantly are coming down with this condition mio carditis