be focused on testing, we should also be focused on vaccinations because if we want to get back to that normal living with covid approach, it will take getting the community vaccinated. jim, bianna. thank you so much. jim, there seems to be a disconnect what we heard from the government and what we re hearing from healthcare officials and hospitals around the country. meantime, the biden administration is now announcing new initiatives this morning, aimed at keeping schools open as covid cases surge. the administration plans to distribute 10 million covid tests each month to schools as part of the department of health and human services expanded testing program. those only cover a fraction of the tens of millions of students enrolled in k through 12 public schools across the country. cnn medical analyst, former baltimore health commissioner dr. leana wen joins us now. dr. wen, i want to ask you a big picture question here. when you hear from public health
and brian shots is now sidelined with covid. chad pergram, thank you. you can find the nearest testing site by google covert covid testing near me. and to help lead our testing program i tapped i hope by pronounced it right. ingles be. correct? is that right? president biden struggling with the covid-19 testings are name. it s been a pretty broad sweep for him and his agenda. that of the day that is going gone down including dunk hold numbers, we talked to tonight s panel. former director of pressed medications for the trump 2020 campaign, great to have you with
the white house says it s being beta tested. you can get up to four free test kits per household. back to you. charles: good news. the white house rolling out the free at-home covid-19 testing program as they try to keep up the fight against covid. i want to bring in jacqui heinrich who is at the white house to talk about this and the action at today s briefing. what did we learn? yeah, charles, i tried that beta tested website as jonathan mentioned. covidtest.gov. it went live today. the white house saying it will go fully live tomorrow directing people to use it tomorrow, which is the expected launch date where you can get four tests per household. there is one drawback to this. i tested it out, put in my order and you get this message that says the first orders will go
again. good to see you, too. so in your view what is the best way to keep students and teachers safe right now? well, we have to make sure people are vaccinated and boosted, that s number one. number two, testing needs to be ubiquitous, it needs to be consistent, i think at least weekly for the majority of students in our schools, to ensure that they are not coming into schools with the virus. same thing with teachers as well. masks, n95 masks work, contact tracing works but also social distancing works. here is the thing, we opened the schools back up in new york city without any testing program in place, so what happened was everyone came back to school, they didn t know if they were sick or not, and what we saw in many schools across the city, we saw massive spreader events. a remote option i think is also really important because there are many students and parents
at the end of the tunnel. many complained about the c.d.c. and the rules and all this. and what a strict regime viking has been carrying out. we have several ocean ships operating without interruption since july last year and we have not had any outbreak at all. and i don t think any other cruise line can say that. and the reason for this is really the testing program that is out there. because we require that all people on board our ships, get and and passengers, be tested every day through a pcr test. we have those on board and we can do it right there on the spot. so, if everybody followed the same policy there wouldn t have been an issue about outbreaks on cruise ships. we haven t had any and we continue to operate our ships, all seven of them. it s now seven, without any