President Joe Biden on Tuesday will address the nation about how his administration plans to fight a surge in omicron cases raging around the United States, and he’s expected to double down on a warning to unvaccinated Americans that they face a potentially deadly winter ahead.
The omicron variant on Monday became the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States; federal health officials said the strain made up 73% of new infections last week.
Senior administration officials said Biden will tell vaccinated and fully boosted Americans that they “have a high degree of protection against severe illness,” from the omicron variant, but will also acknowledge “because omicron spreads easily, we will see fully vaccinated people get COVID-19.”
“But vaccinated people who get COVID will likely have no symptoms or mild symptoms,” officials added. “Because of that strong protection, the president will tell the American people that if they are vaccinated and follow the process that we all know well – especially masking while traveling – they should feel comfortable celebrating Christmas and the holidays as planned.”
Biden will give the speech Tuesday as the nation surpasses a seven-day average of 125,000 new COVID-19 cases daily, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and as new hospitalizations creep up to 8,000 per day.
The plan the president will discuss Tuesday will build off the winter plan he announced in early December but will include additional steps to target help to “communities in need” and make “vaccines and testing accessible,” according to the White House.
He’ll also issue a “stark warning of what the winter will look like for Americans who choose to remain unvaccinated,” a few days after he told the same group they could expect “a winter of severe illness and death.”
The new measures will cover three specific issue areas, per senior administration officials: Providing more support for hospitals, increasing access to free testing and expanding capacity to get shots in arms.
Biden will direct defense secretary Lloyd Austin to mobilize an additional 1,000 troops to serve overburdened hospitals in the months of January and February. The troops will include military doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other medical personnel, per the White House.
The president will also order an additional 100 clinical personnel to be immediately dispatched to Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire and Vermont, states that have experienced surging cases and whose hospitals are struggling due, in part, to the omicron variant.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday stressed that “this is not a speech about locking the country down” and that the president will say that the U.S. is far more prepared than it was in 2020, once again pointing to the protection of vaccines and boosters.
“He will restate … that well-vaccinated individuals get COVID due to the highly transmissible nature of omicron. Their cases will likely be mild or asymptomatic,” she said. “Our health experts assess that you’re 14 times more likely to die of COVID if you have not been vaccinated.”
As the president and top health officials urge vaccinations and boosters as safeguards against omicron, the surge in cases during the holidays could be a major setback for an administration that has touted evidence of economic recovery in recent months and for a president who had predicted Christmas could be the end of the pandemic.
“I believe we’ll be approaching normalcy by the end of this year,” Biden said from a Pfizer manufacturing facility in mid-February. “And God willing, this Christmas will be different than the last. But I can’t make that commitment to you.”
In early December, the president announced his winter plan to fight omicron, which included an increase in booster vaccination sites, a messaging campaign, the launch of family vaccination sites, an increase in “rapid response” teams for hard-hit communities and a plan to make rapid tests covered by insurance in 2022.
The White House also announced plans to send 50 million rapid tests to community sites and clinics, though they received backlash for not making more tests free and widely available to the millions of Americans who may need one. Testing lines grew and wrapped around blocks in places such as New York City this week as more cases were detected.
President Biden on Tuesday will announce additional steps to make testing accessible, according to Psaki.
Those steps will include new federal testing sites, the first of which will be implemented in New York City this week.
The Biden administration has also purchased half a billion COVID-19 tests that will be distributed to Americans free-of-charge come January, when the federal government will launch a website to search for the free tests.
But senior administration officials said the government will not track the results of those 500 million tests, should they be used, instead encouraging Americans who test positive to “consult with your doctor and local public health department.”
The renewed effort to fight the pandemic will also include increasing the amount of pop-up and mobile vaccination clinics across the country, with at least one mobile unit in Washington and four across New Mexico.
The administration will also surge vaccinators to at least 12 states and tribes to speed the amount of shots-in-arms each day.
