taylor: let's look at how the equity markets performed. a record high when it comes to the dow you saw a little pullback on the s&p 500. technology is really where you saw a big pullback. why? if you change up the board it was all a yield story. coming in today yesterday was only the sixth time this year yields really climbed more than 10 basis points. . that story continued again today. really the focus continues to be all the bond market. that is the market wrap. would you miss starts right now.

caroline: it is almost two years into the covid outbreak and we are still dealing with a surge of cases. still seeing science and government fighting to stop the spread. and still seeing some companies keeping employees out of the office and at home. it is a fight many hoped would be over by now but omicron accounts for 95% of new cases in the united states. one million new cases in one day alone. luckily hospitals so far are seeing fewer severe outcomes from this wave then they saw in past spikes. people are still dying. but president biden, boris johnson and other global leaders are having covid dominate their agendas to start 2022. romaine: we talk a lot about where we are in this cycle and the idea we are going to have to live with that. but of course living with it means having and acting with -- having an accurate way of --

president biden focused a lot on booster shots and vaccinations. i want you to hear specifically what he had to say about the availability of tests. >> on testing, i know this remains frustrating. believe me, it is frustrating to me. but we are making improvements. in the last two weeks we have set up federal testing sites all over the country. we are adding more each and every day. romaine: those comments from the president coming just before he went into a meeting with his covid advisors, and coming just after the cdc released new guidance on the pfizer vaccine. it talks about the idea of what the booster shots can do, the age range. i mean, this helps. anything we have to improve our arsenal, whether it is vaccines and boosters, tests, masks, anything that helps is certainly

welcome. taylor: like you said, the ability to be able to attract -- to track this effectively. drew armstrong is here. it could be merely a function of supply and demand right now but given that we are almost two years into it, how is testing still not able to meet the demand? drew: i think testing seemed able to meet the demand when we were just having these regional outbreaks, and there was not the need for a lot of at home testing to do return to school and all the incorporating testing more into daily life. now that you have a situation where you have a tremendous number of people getting sick at once because of a much milder apparently, but much more transmissible variant of the virus, you have a serious demand spike both because there are more people sick and there are more needed uses for testing. we are in a time where things

have gotten really skewed. my guess is the demand for this will probably fall off for the supply increases. what i mean by that is if this pattern of rapid rise in omicron cases is followed by the same rapid decline in cases, i have a hard time believing the test supply will catch up before the number of cases dropped. so that should shift things. time and time again the biology of the virus has been ahead of our supply chain throughout most of the pandemic. probably another case of that here. caroline: who has been getting it right? i go by anecdotal evidence. don't get me wrong, the u.k. are getting frustrated there are not enough tests, but there were a lot of them. how have other governments been able to foresee this coming and decide testing would be a tactic that would take rather than the

u.s. which seems to be about the booster shot? drew: i think the u.s. has struggled in a lot of ways to get ahead of situations that probably could have been gotten ahead of quite easily. we talked about variants and things like that. a lot of scientists have been saying for months there were beta variant and the u.s. -- they would be a variant and the u.s. did not put itself in a good position for that. ditto testing. it did not seem like there wasn't much of an effort to dramatically increase tests to the level of what would be happening here. there has been a just enough approach that has been too little, too late, and that is frustrating people. romaine: jen psaki was asked about this a couple weeks ago, a reporter asked her about at home tests, and whether the white house should do more. and the response that we got from jen psaki i think was taken by a lot of people to be a little less than forthright.

i am curious here about the new cdc guidelines with regards to isolation, and what people should do if they do contract covid or if they feel they have been around people with covid. why are we shortening the timeframe now? what is the rationale the cdc has given? drew: one of the things we are seeing, especially for people who are vaccinated, is the course of this illness has been a little shorter. i know there is debate about this, but the ability to be able to test, try and identify continued transmissibility of the virus. this is one of these things where there has been a huge amount of changes to what the guidelines have been. the guidelines continue to evolve. another thing we are seeing is you talk about workforce shortages. there are a lot of people in the health care space who are needed to take care of patients, and you're in district he situation where you have people who are getting infected, getting positive, having to call out of

work because they are sick with a hopefully mild case of covid. but those are the same people needed in hospitals to take care of patients. the u.s. is caught in a bind in terms of what does it do to take care of people who are really sick when you have people who are mildly ill but who are absently critical workers are caring for those people. i think there is an attempt to adapt to reality. i also think that has proven very frustrating and very confusing for a lot of people who are watching guidelines change through a blend of science and need every couple of months. people just get fatigued with trying to keep up with the stuff. romaine: very confusing for a lot of people. and in fairness to cdc and the government, they are dealing with something changing quickly so they have to change guidance as those changes come. drew armstrong, helping us kick off this conversation.

we are going to continue that conversation right now with dr. jessica justman, professor over at the columbia school of public health. jessica, i want to start off with testing here. availability of testing, and more importantly, do you think we should have put more emphasis on testing over the last couple of months instead of just on vaccinations and boosters? jessica: i think that many of us knew or were predicting that a winter surge was coming. that is because in the winter, that is when we have surges in respiratory illnesses, influenza, and other viral causes of infection. so it is not a surprise. yes, it's disappointing we are not better prepared. yes, we should have taken steps to be in a better position than we are now. but we needed to multitask on this. we needed to do vaccines and

boosters and prepare for more testing at the same time. i really would not choose testing over vaccines and boosters, no. taylor: you talked about the winter season, you brought up the flu. earlier i was listening to comments from dr. scott gottlieb , formerly over at the fda, saying this is going to be the pivotal year when covid-19 becomes like the flu, where it will be seasonal, we will learn to live with that. do you see that as well, this y ear being that pivotal gear? jessica: i hope he is right, but right now covid is still far more severe than influenza. the number of people who have died from influenza is, like, one tenth of the people who die from covid when you go back and look at the numbers. it's a really steep difference. the number of children

hospitalized with covid is much greater than the number of children hospitalized with influenza. i think we need to get that difference down before we can live with it. what might allow us to get to that is if we can really have access to safe and effective and easy to take treatments once you have covid. i was very encouraged several weeks ago when the antiviral agents came out. paxlovid and the merck agent. another looking considerably effective. in the next six months if we have really great access to those antivirals, maybe then this might be the year that is pivotal and allows us to change. but i will also point out, we have to keep in mind the global situation and not just think about the u.s. we have many parts of the world

that do not have enough access to vaccines, do not have enough access to testing, and of course do not have enough access to treatment. and as long as we have that situation, we're really going to be looking at more variants coming along. so we have to stay global as well. caroline: to that end, we are optimists, human nature makes us that, so we look at this being a pivotal year. we have to retrain our mind this comes from a variant because the developed world did not focusing up -- focus enough on other nations, getting them back senate it. what then of the next variant? because we are also optimistic and we hope variants will just become milder. will this happen? jessica: i really think that the crystal ball gazing is neither tricky -- i do not want to

predict what the next variant will be like. more mild, more severe. the best thing we can do is try to prepare for both kinds of scenarios, and that's going to mean working on getting more vaccines and more testing and more treatment resources to other parts of the world that do not have them. again, i just think it's very tricky to try and imagine what the next variant is going to be, but i really do think we are going to have more variants come. romaine: fair enough. i want to get your thoughts on some of the lessons learned. we're effectively two years into this pandemic and you have a wealth of experience in dealing with other infectious diseases. i am curious if the health care we have in this nation, the government response that we had to the covid outbreak going back

to march 2020, the rollout of the vaccines, and now attention being put on testing. are there lessons we can take away from this so that when the next pandemic comes along, and there will be one, how prepared are we going to be to deal with it? are we going to deal with it better? jessica: i would say that we need to do a better job of stockpiling our resources so that we have, i guess i will call it a deep bench, that we have a good supply of test kits and vaccines. i think we have to think about our health care staffing is another important resource and try and figure out how we can rapidly deploy health care from one part of the health care sector to another. we have done that before but i think it is just good to keep those plans really tuned up.

all of this is hard to do in the middle of a big pandemic surge. we have to be fair to ourselves adn know what the task is here. caroline: and also not avert our gaze when we hope to have easier times and try to make sure we take stock while turning our attention onto new things. dr. jessica justman, really gre at. thank you so much for your xrt's. next we are going to get -- for your expertise. next, michael downing is going to be joining us. we look forward to getting his update. this is bloomberg. ♪ this is bloomberg. ♪

romaine: today we are taking a closer look at the spike in coronavirus cases. taylor, you have been focusing a lot more on things like the severity of some of these cases and hospitalizations, which when you look at that data, it might give us more hope. taylor: exactly. we talk a lot about cases and in the beginning of the pandemic that was the concern. but if the hospitalizations and the death rate has not moved as much as cases have moved up, maybe that is a sign we are getting through the worst of it. lo and behold hospital admissions, that is in white, that line has spiked up, but death and i see you patients, that is -- and icu patients, that is nowhere following that trajectory.

the u.s. taking cues from south africa and maybe the u.k. as well, if we are going to be mirroring that trajectory. there is hope you can get through this with much less severe cases. caroline: much less. but what about 60% of a much larger number? because of course now we are seeing a wall of people getting covid-19 like we have not seen previously. michael dowling is with us. new york state's largest health care providers. more than 16,000 affiliated physicians. you have put pen to paper authoring books on how you can leave through the pandemic. this way it so much larger, how are you finding it on the ground in the hospital's? michael: obviously we are very busy. but it is quite manageable. there is no crisis. we have just got to be careful here not to promote more hysterical -- hysteria than is needed but stay calm.

it is also important to keep perspective. there is good news, and this is important, especially when you compare where we are today to where we were a year ago. let me go through a couple of those good news things. one is vaccines work. we know that. patients today are less sick overall. omicron has milder effects than the delta variant. the percentage of people in the icu is very low. in our system right now it is only about 9%. the numbers of people on vents is very low. in our system it is less than 6%. and about 50% of the people who are in the hospital with covid, about half of them did not come in because of covid. they came in because of another reason. and they happen to have covid,

but they are not being treated for covid, they are being treated for the other reason they came in. so there is a lot of good news here. today we have 1500 people in the hospital overall with covid. about half of them came in because of covid. and the people who are sick -- and this is important to point out, and we have done this before -- the people who are really sick, and the people who are in the icu overall, are people who are not vaccinated. so, if you are vaccinated, in all likelihood you will have very mild illness. and i believe, and we believe that this will get better over the next couple of weeks. omicron is bound to increase dramatically and spike, and then it levels off and drops off pretty quickly. and i think over the next two to

three weeks we will see a drop off on this. so everything is under control. it is not as crazy as you would think when you listen to a lot of the media. when i go home at night i think i'm in a disaster. yet when i am walking out every day i think we can manage this, we can do it. romaine: this is why we like to have you on. we like to bring some levity to the concerns. and people are concerned. i am curious about your workforce. we have heard a lot of evidence about hospital workers, the short staffing, either because of omicron or maybe just some of the labor shortages that were tied into the labor crisis. how are you holding up right now with regards to staffing? michael: we are doing ok. it is a little stressful because right now -- and remember, we have about 78,000 employees -- right now i have about 2500 employees out. they are either in quarantine because they were in contract

that contact with someone, or they are sick. so we have to move staff from one place to another, but we are managing it. we meet on this every couple of hours. there is no crisis situation with regards to staff. but it's a little bit stressful. and i have been walking the floors, meeting with the staff on the ground. and when you walk the florist you feel very good about it, because these are great people. they obviously wish it would just kind of end and get better, but they are handling it. that is why it is very important to be on the ground. so we're doing ok with staff. remember, 2500 people out from me is less than 2% of my staff. so, we can handle it. taylor: really appreciate your time. we wish we had more of it. we will get you back to continue this conversation. and we will be back with our final thoughts, next.

this is bloomberg. ♪ s bloomberg. ♪

romaine: everyone likes to blame the media for this, but we are just reporting the numbers and the facts, and the fact of the matter is you have case counts up, school closures rising, and a lot of travel restricted. but as you pointed out, that does not clearly mean this was as bad as what we saw in april of 2020. taylor: dr. fauci also said last week many people are in the hospital not because of covid. when it comes to children, hospitalizations, they are being counted as covid. so you maybe wonder if things are not as bad. caroline: there is no crisis in hospitals. there is no crisis in the nurse workforce. so says michael dowling. but there is a crisis of

confidence at the moment, and perhaps this is what the government needs to start tackling. we are going to see that more high-frequency data coming when people get back out there. have a great evening, everyone. stay well. this is bloomberg. ♪ is bloomberg. ♪

>> from the heart of where innovation, money, and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is "bloomberg technology," with emily chang. emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco. coming up in the next hour, the verdict is in. elizabeth holmes found guilty of fraud and facing up to 20 years in prison. where her case goes from here.