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President Joe Biden's decision to wait until Tuesday to address his plan to combat the rapidly spreading COVID Omicron variant has been met with incredulity as many criticized his apparent lack of urgency while he spends the weekend in Delaware. It comes after Vice President Kamala Harris admitted on Friday that the administration was not prepared for the variant as cases doubled over the past 24 hours, with all but six states confirming cases, stoking fears of shutdowns similar to the ones in 2020. Some have claimed that waiting till next week to outline a plan against Omicron is not...

Saturday night may not be so live from New York this week. The Post has learned that “Saturday Night Live” was on the verge of canceling tonight’s final episode of the iconic sketch show’s 2021 season due to an in-house outbreak of positive COVID-19 cases. A set insider has revealed that “four actors” have tested positive for coronavirus — and “three others” have called out because they are now “fearful” about coming to NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center, where the weekly sketch show is filmed in Midtown. Another insider claimed that executive producer Lorne Michaels had tested positive, adding...

New Yorkers are struggling to find COVID-19 tests as the city suffers a surge of infections driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant. After New York recorded a record number of new cases on Friday, each new positive test is kicking off frantic text messages to friends and colleagues warning them to get tested, and the looming Christmas holiday is prompting scores more to seek the tests before they travel. The surge in demand has stretched the city's testing capacity to the limit, with wait times of more than two hours on Saturday at some city testing centers and pharmacies...

President Biden to announce fresh measures to combat ‘new phase of the pandemic,’ will issue “stark warning” to unvaccinated Americans

The first US case of the Omicron COVID strain has been confirmed in the state of California, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced during a press briefing on Wednesday. The “variant of concern,” which has already been reported in seventeen countries, has now reached California, the president’s top medical adviser said while flanked by White House press secretary Jen Psaki. Dr. Anthony Fauci said the infected individual, who was fully vaccinated, had just returned from South Africa to the San Francisco area on Nov. 22 and tested positive on Nov. 29.

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has made its way to California. The variant’s presence in the state — reported Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — is not unexpected. First detected in southern Africa last month, the strain has already been found in nearly two dozen countries around the globe. Still, the arrival of the highly mutated variant comes at what was already shaping up to be a particularly precarious time in California. Officials have long expressed concern that the one-two punch of the end-of-year holiday season and colder weather will increasingly push people to...

Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas dismissed the new COVID-19 Omicron strain as Democrats' bid to 'cheat' in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections in a controversial tweet he posted Saturday. 'Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots,' wrote the lawmaker who served as the personal doctor to Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. 'Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election - but we're not going to let them!'

The White House on Sunday called on people to get their booster shots as a matter of urgency, as the new variant Omicron was confirmed to have arrived in North America. Joe Biden returned from his Thanksgiving break to hold an emergency meeting with his COVID advisors on Sunday evening - with Dr Anthony Fauci sounding a hopeful note, saying he believed 'existing vaccines are likely to provide a degree of protection against severe cases' from Omicron. Two cases of Omicron were confirmed in Canada on Sunday - both in patients in the capital, Ottawa, who had traveled to Nigeria....

President Biden will provide an update on his administration's response to the new COVID-19 omicron variant on Monday, according to the White House, after Dr. Anthony Fauci said it will take roughly two weeks to gather more information on the new strain. Biden met with Fauci and members of the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Sunday, two days after the World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency meeting to discuss the new COVID-19 strain, which it labeled a variant of concern.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) declared a state of emergency due to the new “Omicron” Covid variant spreading in Africa. The declaration goes into effect on December 3 and gives the Health Department the power to limit “non-essential” procedures (will likely be enforced through the lens of equity) at hospitals. “We continue to see warning signs of spikes this upcoming winter, and while the new Omicron variant has yet to be detected in New York State, it’s coming,” Hochul said. NBC New York reported:

Alarms were today raised after one in ten passengers coming into the Netherlands from South Africa this morning tested positive for Covid and a wave of suspected cases of the new super-mutant variant were spotted in Europe. Around 600 passengers arrived on two planes in Schipol Airport, near Amsterdam, from Johannesburg — the epicentre for the new strain that experts fear is 40 per cent more vaccine evasive than Delta — hours after travel bans were put in place. Some 61 of those on the planes tested positive for the virus on PCR tests after they were stopped at the...

Joe Biden is being accused of being a hypocrite after he announced a ban on travel from eight southern African countries in response to the new Omicron COVID variant despite labeling Donald Trump as 'xenophobic' when the Republican imposed a ban on travelers last year. On Friday, Biden, who is vacationing in Nantucket for a Thanksgiving break with his family, said travel will be banned from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi.

Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said on Friday they do not plan any changes to their South Africa-US routes after the White House said it plans to impose new travel curbs on southern Africa starting Monday amid concerns about a new COVID-19 variant. Delta and United are the only US passenger carriers that have direct flights to southern Africa. Delta currently operates service between Johannesburg and Atlanta three times weekly and the US airline said “there are no planned adjustments to service at this time.”

President Joe Biden is being slammed for still allowing flights from South Africa to land in the US as his top health expert said he 'wouldn't be surprised' if the new super mutant variant Omicron was already in US following a flight from Johannesburg landing at Newark airport Saturday morning. -snip- 'It has a large number of mutations, particularly in that area of the virus that relates to its ability to bind to the cells in your nasal pharynx and in your lung,' Fauci told the Today Show Saturday morning. 'You have to be careful and assume that that's the...

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Saturday morning that he would not be shocked to learn that the COVID-19 omicron variant is already in the U.S. In an interview on NBC's "Weekend TODAY" show, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director told co-hosts Kristen Welker and Peter Alexander that the strain has a large number of mutations that would suggest it could potentially evade immune protection and that scientists can predict it will be more transmissible. "We don't know that yet, but you have to be careful and assume that that's the case. It also has a bunch of...

The governor of New York on Friday declared a state of emergency as COVID transmission reached rates not seen since April 2020, and warned that the troubling new variant of COVID which first emerged in Botswana is 'coming'. Earlier on Friday, the US banned flights from eight Southern African countries to try and prevent the mutant strain, Omicron, from arriving. Kathy Hochul, the governor, said that all non-urgent procedures could be postponed, beginning December 3, if the hospital's capacity falls dangerously low. -snip- She also issued a 'declaration of disaster emergency', noting that COVID transmission is at a level not...

No cases of the newly identified variant have been detected in New York or the rest of the United States, for that matter. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency ahead of potential COVID-19 spikes this winter due to the already-circulating Delta and newly-identified Omicron variants of coronavirus. The declaration, which goes into effect on Dec. 3, will allow the state to acquire pandemic-fighting supplies, increase hospital capacity and fight potential staffing shortages. It would also allow the state Health Department to limit non-essential and non-urgent procedures at hospitals. "We continue to see warning signs of...

Blue states, some of which had the most restrictive requirements in the country throughout the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, are experiencing massive surges of the virus as the holiday season arrives, prompting some to reimplement mitigation strategies and keep others in place. Michigan is reporting one of the biggest surges in the nation, experiencing a daily average of 8,457 cases, or 85 per 100,000, according to the New York Times‘ tracker. That reflects an 88 percent increase in cases in the last 14 days alone. This week, the federal government agreed to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) request to send “two medical...

Here we go again. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Friday to postpone elective hospital surgeries — something that hasn’t been done since the worst of the initial coronavirus outbreak last year. Hochul said she made the move to deal with staffing shortages and boost bed capacity amid an anticipated “spike” in new cases and the emergence of the new Omicron variant in South Africa. The strain is named after a letter of the Greek alphabet. “We’ve taken extraordinary action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and combat this pandemic. However, we continue to see warning signs of spikes...