dealing with what really we re call, hearing people call a crisis there. because so many kids, 550 schools, about 340,000 school kids in the city of chicago, out of school for a third consecutive day because of the rising covid-19 cases. so listen to what the teachers union president says, he wants to see happen so that teachers like him feel safe going back into the classroom. if you want to get us back into the schools quicker, provide testing. you know, do what d.c. has done, do what new york has done, do what los angeles has done. do with you do with your own child care. provide a test, so kids are negative coming back into the school. and then set up a meaningful testing program. reporter: that s exactly what we re hearing out in the bay area as well. san francisco, oakland, teachers there organizing a sick-out yesterday. they re demanding more masks,
delta variant was brewing overseas, here, the federal government, the president had an event on july 4th, declaring sort of independence from the virus. critics have said, the administration wasn t quite prepared for that variant. that s a criticism we re starting to hear again now. with omicron a few weeks ago starting it to emerge in south africa. but the new testing program wasn t announced until yesterday. why the delay? why weren t tests done a few weeks ago? we know questions were asked about it in the briefing room. well, jonathan, what we ve been doing is building our capacity. actually even before the president s announcement yesterday we quadrupled the supply available to the country. the announcement the president made yesterday. very significant. 500 million tests, testing kits, that will start to be available in january. we also just announced a couple weeks ago, 50 million tests that we re making available this month at rural health centers, at community centers. we ann
and get them in the schools and in the community and we re happy about the response from the president and the white house. so you re adamant about keeping new york schools open and many parents are applauding you for that. elgt experts say the way to keep schools open safely is with vaccines and masking and vent lags and widespread testing. right now new york uses a complicated opt-in randomized testing program that only covers a fraction of teachers in schools. the teachers have calling for weekly testing, mandated for students and staff that would be the safest. why not? that s a great question. and first i want to take my hat off to michael mulgrew, uft president. we re seeing what s playing out in other locales but here in new york we re doing something that s important, we re communicating and even in areas that we disagree, we say that s fine. now let s get down to the task of keeping our schools open.
new details to send 10 million covid-19 tests to k-12 schools nationwide every month. both rapid antigen and pcr test will be supplied and overseeing that effort and the entire federal government s testing program is the newly named senior adviser to the white house covid response team somebody quite familiar to us in 2020. the hypercontagious omicron variant pushes schools and hospitals to the brink. data shows almost 5,400 schools had to cancel some form of in-person learning last week. and nationwide more than 150,000 covid patients are currently hospitalized, that means one in five hospital beds in this country is currently occupied by a covid positive patient. covid is spreading so rapidly at this rate most people are going to get covid. joining me now is msnbc
what are you going to do about it? it s very disappointing. we are disappointed about it. the intention behind that was to keep the american workplace safe. as we put this rule together, we talked to medical experts who supported us saying it was the right thing to do. we spoke to legal experts who said we had the right to do it. on top of it, what we were doing at the department of labor and osha was not a mandate. it was a vaccine or testing option. we will stay focused on making sure the american workplace is safe. i have reached out to companies that might want to institute what we were doing, we will help awe long the way. we will help you set up a testing program so that you can make sure you can get people back safely. secretary, good to see you. thank you for taking the time to be with us. straight ahead, jamie raskin breaks down the latest in the january 6 investigation and a