WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden urged concern but not alarm Tuesday as the United States set records for daily reported covid-19 cases and his administration sought to ease concerns about testing shortages, school closures and other disruptions caused by the omicron variant.
In remarks before a meeting with his virus response team at the White House, Biden aimed to convey the administration's urgency in addressing omicron and convince wary Americans that the current situation bears little resemblance to the onset of the pandemic or last year's deadly winter. The president emphasized that vaccines, booster shots and therapeutic drugs have lessened the danger for the overwhelming majority of Americans who are fully vaccinated.
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"You can still get covid, but it's highly unlikely, very unlikely, that you'll become seriously ill," Biden said of vaccinated people.
"There's no excuse, there's no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated," he added. "This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated." He encouraged Americans, including newly eligible teenagers ages 12-15, to get booster doses of the vaccines for maximum protection.
Compared with last year, more Americans are employed, most kids are in classrooms, and instances of death and serious illness are down -- greatly so among the vaccinated.
"We're in a very different place than we were a year ago," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki when asked if the country had lost control of the virus.
Still, over the past several weeks Americans have seen dire warnings about hospitals reaching capacity amid staffing shortages, thousands of holiday flight cancellations in part because airline crews were ill or in quarantine, and intermittent reports of school closures because of the more-transmissible variant.
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On a conference call with governors, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's top covid-19 science adviser, said Americans "should not be complacent" even though initial data shows omicron to produce less severe disease than earlier strains. He said the number of people getting infected "might overwhelm the positive impact of reduced severity" and "severely stress our hospitals."
While most schools across the country remain open, Biden took aim at those that have closed, saying he believes they have the money for testing and other safety measures. "I believe schools should remain open," he said.
The president also announced that the U.S. is doubling its order for an antiviral pill produced by Pfizer that was recently authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent serious illness and death from covid-19. That means 20 million doses, with the first 10 million pills to be delivered by June.
A senior administration official said that combined with other therapies, such as monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma, 4 million treatments that are effective against the omicron variant would be available by the end of January.
The pills are "a game-changer and have the potential to dramatically alter the impact of covid-19, the impact it's had on this country and our people," Biden said.
The White House is under pressure to ease a nationwide shortages of virus tests. Long lines and chaotic scenes over the holidays marred the administration's image as having the pandemic in hand.
"On testing, I know this remains frustrating. Believe me, it's frustrating to me, but we're making improvements," Biden said.
In a reversal, the White House announced last month that it would make 500 million rapid antigen tests available for free, but it will be weeks if not months before those tests are widely available. The administration notes that those tests are on top of the existing supply of rapid tests and that even a small increase will help ease the shortages. Additionally, private insurers will be required to cover the cost of at-home tests starting later this month.
Test manufacturers had until Tuesday night to respond to the government's contract request, and the first awards are expected to be made this week, Psaki said. The administration is still developing a system for Americans to order the tests as well as a means to ship them to people's homes.
Pressed on when the first tests would reach people, Psaki said, "I don't have an update on that at this point in time."
In a letter Monday, GOP Sens. Richard Burr and Roy Blunt, the top Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on health, respectively, pressed the Department of Health and Human Services for answers on how the administration was working to address nationwide testing shortages.
"With over $82.6 billion specifically appropriated for testing, and flexibility within the department to allocate additional funds from COVID-19 supplemental bills or annual appropriations if necessary, it is unclear to us why we are facing such dire circumstances now," they wrote. "It does not appear to be because of lack of funding, but a more fundamental lack of strategy and a failure to anticipate future testing needs by the administration."
White House officials have noted that the spike in testing demand is driven not just by the omicron variant, but by people seeking to travel safely during the holidays and return to school after, and that the shortages are global.
"Turns out, Omicron is driving a spike in demand for testing ... everywhere," tweeted Ben Wakana, deputy director of strategic communications and engagement for the White House's covid-19 response team, highlighting similar shortages in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
HOSPITAL CONCERNS
The explosive increase in U.S. case counts is raising alarm, but some experts believe the focus should instead be on hospital admissions -- and those aren't climbing as quickly.
Fauci, for one, said Sunday on ABC that with many infections causing few or no symptoms, "it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases." Other experts argue that case counts still have value.
As the super-contagious omicron variant rages across the U.S., new cases per day have more than tripled over the past two weeks, reaching a record-shattering average of 480,000. Schools, hospitals and airlines are struggling as infected workers go into isolation.
Meanwhile, hospital admissions averaged 14,800 per day last week, up 63% from the week before, but still short of the peak of 16,500 per day a year ago, when the vast majority of the U.S. was unvaccinated. Deaths have been stable over the past two weeks at an average of about 1,200 per day, well below the all-time high of 3,400 last January.
Public health experts suspect that those numbers reflect the vaccine's continued effectiveness at preventing serious illness, even against omicron, as well as the possibility that the variant does not make most people as sick as earlier versions.
Omicron accounted for 95% of new infections in the U.S. last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday, in another indication of how fast the variant has spread since it was detected in South Africa in late November.
Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University, said the case count does not appear to be the most important number now.
Instead, she said, the U.S. at this stage of the pandemic should be "shifting our focus, especially in an era of vaccination, to really focus on preventing illness, disability and death, and therefore counting those."
RECORD CASES
More than 1 million people in the U.S. were diagnosed with covid-19 Monday as omicron cases swamp every aspect of daily American life.
The highly mutated variant drove U.S. cases to a record, the most -- by a large margin -- that any country has ever reported. Monday's number is almost double the previous record of about 590,000 set just four days ago in the U.S., which itself was a doubling from the previous week.
It is also more than twice the case count seen anywhere else at any time since the pandemic began more than two years ago. The highest number outside the U.S. came during India's delta surge, when more than 414,000 people were diagnosed on May 7, 2021.
The high numbers being posted in the U.S. come even as many Americans are relying on at-home tests, with results that aren't reported to official government authorities. That means the record is surely a significant underestimate.
While surging cases haven't yet translated into severe infections and skyrocketing deaths, their impact has been felt across the country as the newly infected isolate at home. The results are canceled flights, closed schools and offices, overwhelmed hospitals and strangled supply chains.
Delays in reporting over the holidays may have played a role in the rising rates, some sources say. But the surge is leading authorities to mull a revision of some measures put in place to help guide the nation through the latest phase of the outbreak.
While the CDC shortened the isolation period to five days for asymptomatic people who test positive, the agency may add that they should get negative test results before venturing out, officials said.
The outbreak is also causing companies to halt their return-to-office steps, with the likes of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. adopting the more cautious stance of encouraging staffers to resume working from home.
DOSES GUIDANCE
The CDC recommended Tuesday that Americans who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine seek booster shots five months after the second shot -- not wait six months as earlier guidance said.
The agency also recommended that some immunocompromised children ages 5-11 receive an additional primary vaccine shot 28 days after the second shot, matching the guidance for similar people ages 12 and older. Pfizer's vaccine is the only one authorized for pediatric use in the United States.
The endorsements come on the heels of the authorization of the same steps by the FDA on Monday.
The FDA also cleared 12- to 15-year-olds to receive boosters of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The CDC's vaccine advisory committee is to meet today to discuss whether to recommend that step. If the committee does follow the FDA's lead, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is expected to quickly sign off on the recommendation.
Federal guidance has not changed for when to seek booster shots after initially receiving the Moderna vaccine (six months after the second shot), or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (two months after the single shot).
More than 70% of people in the United States who are 12 or older have been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
At least 1.9 million adolescents between ages 12 and 15 have tested positive, according to the CDC. Children are less likely to develop serious illness than adults are, but they can still become very sick and even die.
MARYLAND EMERGENCY
Meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan declared a 30-day state of emergency that mobilizes the National Guard to assist state and local health officers at testing and vaccine sites, and authorizes the state Department of Health to take steps to increase staffing at overwhelmed hospitals.
Hogan said his state expects to see its "most challenging" phase of the pandemic in the next four to six weeks. He said models are showing that hospitals could see more than 5,000 people hospitalized, which would be a 250% increase.
"With this new surge of omicron, it's important for Marylanders to go back to using common sense and doing the things that will keep us safe: avoiding crowds, keeping your distance, washing your hands, and yes, once again, wearing the d*** masks," Hogan said.
On Tuesday, the state Health Department reported 3,057 people hospitalized -- an increase of 500% in the past seven weeks, Hogan said, and a pandemic record.
Hospitals implemented pandemic surge plans when they reached 2,000 covid-19 patients, which included the transfer of patients from overcrowded hospitals to others that could accommodate them and the cancellation of nonurgent elective surgeries.
Hogan said his focus continues to be keeping people out of hospitals and preventing deaths. Asked about a statewide mask mandate, he said he is not considering one because it is difficult to enforce.
The governor has been under fire for weeks to take additional action to address the state's surge. He said Tuesday that the models are "drastically different" than they were previously, which led him to take the latest steps.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Darlene Superville, Rachel La Corte and Carla K. Johnson of The Associated Press; by Jinshan Hong of Bloomberg News (TNS); by Adeel Hassan of The New York Times; and by Ovetta Wiggins of The Washington Post.