https://ift.tt/2kmUBVA. President Joe Biden laid out a new concerted effort Tuesday to combat the surging omicron variant of the coronavirus, dispatching federal health care workers to short-handed hospitals, pre-positioning the national stockpile of medical equipment around the country and offering 500 million free COVID-19 test kits to Americans.
Biden detailed his attack plan in a White House address as the number of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. is markedly increasing again, with 143,000 recorded on Monday, along with another 1,300 deaths. Nearly three-fourths of the new cases are linked to the highly transmissible omicron variant.
But Biden said that fully vaccinated people, and especially those who have gotten booster shots, can safely celebrate the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays with family and friends.
“We should all be concerned about omicron, but not panicked,” he said.
He warned, however, “If you’re not fully vaccinated, you have reason to be concerned.” Biden said the 40 million unvaccinated people in the United States “have an obligation, quite frankly, a patriotic duty, to your country” to get inoculated.
Moreover, he emphasized, “Your choice [whether to get vaccinated] can be a choice between life and death. Please get vaccinated. It’s the only responsible thing to do.”
But even with the growing omicron threat, he said the United States is not returning to the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, when thousands of businesses and schools were shut down.
“Absolutely no,” Biden said.