A ‘pandemic on fast forward’
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Omicron has coronavirus cases surging across the country. What’s the outlook for this highly transmissible variant?
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The highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus has taken over as the dominant strain in the United States. Now, post-holidays, virus cases are surging, with about 500,000 per day in the United States. Americans are struggling with breakthrough infections, strained hospital systems and the uncertainty of what might come next.
Reporter Dan Diamond discusses what you need to know about the omicron variant and what it could tell us about how the pandemic might end.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Give a helping hand this holiday season with the Washington Post helping hand. |
| 0:04.6 | This is John Kelly and I'm writing about Bread for the City, Friendship Place, and Miriam's Kitchen over the next few weeks. |
| 0:11.1 | Go to posthelpinghand.com to learn more and donate today. |
| 0:15.9 | Can we just start out by you telling us who are you and what do you do? |
| 0:20.4 | I'm Dan Diamond. I have been covering COVID in some fashion cleave for two years. |
| 0:26.7 | This week as the anniversary of that. |
| 0:29.3 | Oh, you have a COVID anniversary. |
| 0:32.5 | Dan Diamond is a health policy reporter at the Washington Post, covering mostly the pandemic. |
| 0:37.8 | He's also the guy that I look to when I'm trying to figure out how petrified to be about all of this. |
| 0:43.4 | The surge is real and it's hitting everywhere. |
| 0:48.0 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 0:51.6 | I'm Cleve Rootson. It's Tuesday, January 4. |
| 0:55.4 | Today, everything you need to know about the Amacron Surge. |
| 0:58.8 | What's worse, what's better, and what it all says about how the pandemic might end. |
| 1:06.3 | According to the Washington Post's tracker, where we look at the seven-day average of cases, |
| 1:11.3 | of hospitalizations, of deaths, the rolling average is up from about 100,000 cases per day a |
| 1:17.9 | month ago to about 500,000 cases per day right now. |
| 1:21.8 | And that's underselling how many people are probably infected. |
| 1:25.0 | There are a lot of Americans who still can't get tested. |
| 1:27.7 | There are other Americans who are taking at-home tests, |
| 1:30.5 | testing positive, but they're not reporting their results. |
| 1:33.2 | So this is in terms of infections, the most significant part of the pandemic by far. |
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