works against omicron, but the other things that i would love to hear is, you know, what is the end goal of the u.s. covid response, once we're out of this surge. what is our -- you know, what we build into the resilience of making sure when the future variants come, that we will not be as affected. but, of course, jose, what we're likely to see is all of this political drama. the important measures we're willing to hear about, the political drama outpaces all of those important conversations that regular americans would like to hear about. >> dr. bhadelia, how important is testing for this omicron wave and whatever may be coming down the pike? >> i think, jose, it's always important, because testing in the current wave still allows people to know their status and change their behavior. at the current rate of cases, the cases themselves have started to decouple from hospitalizations, but given the massive amounts of cases that are still leading, still a large