0 now, the white house repeatedly has warned russia over the last few weeks that a russian invasion of ukraine would have severe, severe diplomatic and economic consequences. what did administration official told politicaltratio official told politica will come in the midst of a, quote, moment of crisis between the two nations. we'll have a lot more on that coming up later in the show.ha but we start tonight with a moment of crisis of our own right here at home.a take a look at this map. this is a map tracking community transmission of covid across alt 50 states. blue and yellow there on the screen means low to moderate. orange means substantial. m red means high. and as you can see in this picture, every single state, every single one, is red. community transmission of covid is at the highest recorded level in every state in the country as of this night.e now, the u.s. yesterday just recorded its highest ever single-day record for new covid infections. with new cases drawing less of a curve and more of a straight vertical line. new cases in the last two weeks are up by 126%. the world health organization said today they're anticipating a, quote, tsunami of new cases worldwide over the next few weeks.s e o q but so far, thankfully, we have not seen a tsunami of new hospitalizations and deaths along with the spread of omicron.at the hospitalization rate is, in fact, upn over the last two weeks, but only by 11%, much below the rate of new infections.lo daily deaths remain essentially flat.hs now, today the head of the cdc stressed that that might be a good sign, that the omicron go variant is potentially more mild than previous iterations of the virus. p even so, such an astronomical caseload, regardless of how sick people get, means a serious disruption to everyday life. we're already seen that across the country. t take for example, new york city. officials at the subway had to suspend the entire subway line. so many people were out due to covid, there were not enough people to drive the trains around this city. in cincinnati, there are so many firefighters out because of covid that the city there had to declare a state of emergency today to try and help alleviate the shortage. airlines cancelling more than 900 flights again today due to covid staffing problems as well as the weather.in in d.c. today, the smithsonian was forced to close four different museums. and "the washington post" is reporting that that is a large reason why the cdc shortened the isolation period to quarantine people for asymptomatic covid because so many people will test positive at once that it will be literally impossible to keep society functioning. today the white house's top infectious disease expert, anthony fauci, was asked about what our priorities should be as a nation, whether it should be trying to tamp down the number of infections to try and stop the disease from spreading, or if we've entered a new phase of this pandemic where we as a society learn to live with the virus with as little illness, death, and social disruption as possible. m at what point do we cross that a ts todise a are we there already? joining us now is dr. anthony fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor, chies medical adviser to president biden, and the director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases at the nih. dr. fauci, i know you're one of, the busiest scientists in the country right now. it is an honor to have some of your time to help us understand what's going on. i know a lot of people have a lot of questions so we appreciate your time, sir. and there has been plenty of criticism of this new cdc guidance from some public health experts, specifically because of the lack of testing requirements to come out of it. putting that aside for a momentc there's also been a lot of criticism from the general public, i'm sure you've been following that. people have been following public health guidance closely for the past two years in order to stay safe and healthy, people who have specifically come to trust you most of all, and some of them are responding to this guidance ono isolation with confusion, nervousness, and some new distrust. what would you say to them this evening, sir? >> i would try to explain, which we've been trying to do most of the day, why the cdc made that decision. it is very clear right now that when you look at the original guidelines for people who get infected, you put them into we've been trying to do most of we've been trying to do most of isolation for 14 days. many people with this new omicron variant get asymptomatic infections. and as you just showed, multiple examples of the rather severe disruption of society from people who are out of work because, in fact, they are infected. so they were trying to strike a balance. how do we do good public healtha principles at the time we don't have to get to the point where you're forced to essentially shut the country down?t and the decision was made that for people who were asymptomatic, that they should go into isolation for five days. and if they remain asymptomatic, they can get go back to their function, provided they consistently wear a mask. and when they said part of thata was the thing that i think has caused the controversy, is that the cdc said that at that point you don't need to do an antigen test. ccd people question why. the reason is if you look at the risk of transmitting infection from a person who is infected during the first five days of that period versus the second five days, most of the risk is segregated in those first five days. m and so the risk is very, very low of transmitting, as you get into days 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. and the tests that are used, the antigen tests, don't really have a good predictive value as to whether or not you're transmitting. they have a good value early on to say if you're infected. tanti but 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 days later, whether it's positive or negative, we have no studies at all that have shown, and in fact the original fda approval of thn test was not for the purpose of determining if multiple days te following infection that you are able to transmit. and for that reason, the cdc said it was not necessary to have a test, because the risk is low. so that's the explanation for that policy. >> so allow me just to button up this for a moment, because last thursday, the cdc released new guidelines for health care workers who get covid, and they have to isolate for seven days. and then they have a negative gu rapid test before they can leave isolation. and i think that begs the question, why? why seven days for health care workers and five for the rest of us?, se why do they test out of isolation while the rest of us do not? you touched on that y wh specifically, but is this based on specific scientific data, is this data published, or is it internal to the cdc? >> it's internal to the cdc. there's no specific data one for the other. they made a judgment call on that. and likely, if you look at the juidelines, that it can go back to five days for the health care workers, too, if they really need that. >> if you have been exposed to the coronavirus and need to quarantine, there is a different guidance for people who are vaccinated and boosted than for the unvaccinated, but if you are infected and need to isolate, the recommendations don't change, depending on whether you're vaccinated or not. can you explain that for us? >> yeah, if you're infected, you're infected.ai whether or not you're vaccinated or not vaccinated, you're infected.nf when you talk about exposure any quarantine, if you are a person who is vaccinated but not boosted versus a person who is a not vaccinated, because of the greater degree of protection that you would have gotten from being boosted, they're treating people who are vaccinated but not boosted as the same risk as those who are not vaccinated at all, and that's because right now, with omicron, there's a great deal of difference in the level of protection that you get from being boosted following vaccination versus following vaccination alone. >> i want to ask about being contaje contagious and transmissibility.ag you explain that the reason we do not need to test for people who are positive after five days is because the science says the odds of being contagious after those five days are low. dr. walensky has given a few additional reasons. she said a couple of times today that a pcr test could give someone who had a covid positive result for up to 12 weeks. cth so is a pcr test not a good barometer either for transmissibility and isolation? how can people actually tell if they are contagious in the cycle of having covid? how do you measure that if not with pennsylvania cr test or an antigen test? >> that is a very good question, because pcr doesn't measure replication competent virus. it measures viral particles, nucleic acid. so, in other words, i could be infected, have cleared the replication-competent virus from me, butre i can continue to be positive with a pcr for several days after recovering and not being transmissible at all. so although a pcr is good to tell you, am i infected, yes, i am infected. but the very fact that it's positive for, as the cdc director said, for several days and even weeks later, it doesn't give you any indication of whether or not you're transmissible. and i think that's the understandable confusion that people have about testing. testing saying whether you're infected or not versus are you infected plus transmissible. the only way you can tell if it's transmissible, if you can show that there really is live replication virus in you. and the tests don't measure that. they measure the presence or absence of the virus. and the virus could be dead, inactive virus that doesn't transmit. son' it's entirely understandab why people get confused over that, so that's why i try to explain it to people, to hopefully clarify that. >> yeah, i certainly appreciate that. i'm sure a lot of people do as well. i know this is anecdotal, my whole family recently caught covid, we're all positive on antigen tests. i i'm the only one who took a pcr test.hifa i'm the only one, i assume, included in the national case count now.on are we as a country too focused on cases when in reality use of rapid tests means we're probably -- we don't have an accurate assessment of cases ana we should be focusing on hospitalization rates and death rates?be >> that's a very good point. and we are really moving in that direction. it becomes even more relevant when you're dealing -- and we hope, as you mentioned early on, one of the positive encouraging things is that it appears that omicron, from data both in south africa, the uk, and accumulating data here in the united states, indicates that it very well might not be as severe. and many people, from studies that are going on right now, who get omicron have either no symptoms or minimally symptomatic.thre so you get down to the core ou issue of what are we trying to do, what are we trying to prevent.ha we're trying to prevent people from getting sick. so if you have a virus that can give you a lot of infection, really almost like a wave of ve infection like we're seeing right now with omicron, what becomes more important is the number of people and the percentage of people who are sick enough, for example, to require hospitalization. so your point about might it be more important as we now merge into possibly a less severe in virus, which it looks like it is right now, that the critical parameter is how sick people get, do they have to go to the hospital, what is the deaths, as opposed to what is the absoluteh number of positive tests and infected people that you have. very often you can't just forget about the number of people who are infected, because that's the forewarner of what might happend with hospitalization.er but as you get further on and see less severity, clearly hospitalization is the important thing. >> and i want to ask specifically about hospitalization. one of the recent concerns, i'm sure you're getting asked a lot about this, how do you explain the sudden increase in , hospitalizations among children? i mean, if omicron is less severe in 15% to 20% less likely to send somebody to the hospital, why are we seeing this sudden increase in children at hospital with covid? >> well, that's a good question, and there are two things that contribute to that. first of all, quantitatively, you're having so many more elt v people, including children, who are getting infected. and even though hospitalization among children is much, much g lower on a percentage basis than hospitalizations for adults, particularly elderly individuals. however, when you have such a large volume of infections among children, even with a low level of rate of infection, you're r going to still see a lot more children who get hospitalized. but the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of he them are hospitalized with covid as opposed to because of covid. and what we mean by that, if a child goes in the hospital, then automatically get tested for covid. and they get counted as a covid hospitalized individual. when in fact they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.fa so it's overcounting the numbere of children who are, quote, t' hospitalized with covid as opposed to because of covid. >> let me ask you, if i can, sir, about something president biden said on monday, and that was there is no federal solution to this, this gets solved at a state level. i'm curious from your vantage point, obviously, do you agree with the president's assessment that this is going to be solved on a state level?etr, because you obviously work for a federal agency and you have to approach this on a federal level as opposed to piecemeal solutions, state by state. >> yes. t what the president meant, and i think some people took it out of context, he meant that we need to synergize with the states. the federal government alone will not solve the problem. working with the states the way we are doing right now, and what the president expressed during the meeting that we all had with the governors a couple of days ago, that's what he meant, that we as a federal government are not going to do it alone. we need to do it together.g that's exactly what he meant by saying it's not a federal solution. >> and let me finally, sir, just ask you, because we are seeing all this new guidance suddenly as cases are exploding, we appreciate you explaining some of the reasons behind that this evening, but mostly this variant is less severe than previous b variants.se the guidance is based on science but also what people are willing to tolerate after two years of the pandemic, that's according to dr. walensky. what does all of that indicate l about where we are in this pandemic? have we lost control of this virus because of people's behaviors after two years and because of the evolution the virus? do we need to act as though this virus is endemic now and not pandemic? ayman, you've asked several questions, so let me try and briefly give an answer to each of these. we haven't lost control of it. this is a formidable outbreak. it is unprecedented, the likes m of which we have not seen in pr well over a hundred years. we have very good tools against it. we are fortunate enough to have a highly effective and safe number of vaccines. one of the things that's very disconcerting about all of thist is the number of people measured in tens of millions of people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not getting vaccinated. that makes it very difficult to get a very comprehensive control of this virus, when you have so many people who could be protected, who choose for a variety of reasons not to be.d, so the first step towards really getting better control is getting people to realize that not only for their own ir protection and the protection of their family, but also for a communal responsibility, to try and get us as a nation out of this terrible pandemic that we're in. and the only way we're going to do that is to all pull together and recognize that the common enemy is the virus. and there's so much degree of divisiveness in this country, ne that's the last thing in the world you want to have when you're trying to fight a pandemic that is of historic proportion as this one is. so if we start there, we'd be much better off than we were right now. >> it's a pandemic that is not discriminating against red and blue states in this country or informed or uninformed. s dr. anthony fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor, chief medical adviser to in president biden, and the director of the national institute of allergy and infectious disease at the nih, thank you so much, sir, for your time tonight. it is always a pleasure. thank you. we have a lot more ahead here tonight including that phone call happening tomorrow between the president and russian leader vladimir putin. what does russia want, and how should the u.s. respond? stay with us.yo hph sp