U.S. daily COVID-19 cases top 1 million as Omicron rages
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According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 1 million people in the U.S. were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Monday as a tsunami of Omicron swamps the nation, Bloomberg reports.
Mondayâs number is almost double the previous record of about 590,000 set just four days ago in U.S., which itself was a doubling from the prior week.

The previous highest total for a whole week, 1.76M, the figure is expected to be not only surpassed but possibly doubled. 

The record of over 1 million cases is also more than twice the case count seen anywhere else at any time since the onset of pandemic two years ago. The highest number outside U.S. came during Indiaâs Delta surge, when more than 414,000 people were diagnosed on May 7, 2021.
It is also anticipated that this record is a significant under-estimate as many Americans are relying on at-home tests, with results that arenât reported to official government authorities.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to meet with the White House coronavirus response team to discuss a course of action as Omicron becomes ubiquitous.
The outbreak is also causing companies to halt their return-to-office steps, with firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan adopting more cautious stance of encouraging staff to resume working from home at the start of new year.
The silver lining is that deaths from COVID havenât similarly soared. Early studies show the Omicron variant spreads faster than earlier strains but causes milder symptoms.
Vaccine names: Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX), Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN), and Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX).
COVID test makers: Quidel (NASDAQ:QDEL), Fulgent Genetics (NASDAQ:FLGT), Abbott (NYSE:ABT), Roche (OTCQX:RHHBY), Hologic (NASDAQ:HOLX), OraSure (NASDAQ:OSUR), Becton, Dickinson (NYSE:BDX), Cue Health (NASDAQ:HLTH), Lucira Health (NASDAQ:LHDX), Danaher (NYSE:DHR), PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI), and Fluidigm (NASDAQ:FLDM).
Meanwhile, the FDA on Monday expanded the emergency use authorization of a booster dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include youths 12 to 15.
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