World Insights: White House bedeviled by COVID-19 surge fueled by Omicron, Delta variants

Washington (US), December 31: Juan Garcia was planning a New Year's trip to his home country in Latin America. He needed a COVID-19 test before being allowed to fly.
But Garcia, working in management in the state of Virginia, tried for two hours to register online at various testing centers, only to find out that all appointments had already been taken, he told Xinhua.
Garcia's experience is common this holiday season, as many Americans strive to ensure they can safely gather with relatives amid the rapid spread of the omicron variant.
Americans are facing long lines at testing centers this holiday season, or are finding that testing centers are fully booked when they try to register online.
U.S. President Joe Biden is in the hot seat. Critics are crying incompetence in his handling of COVID-19, as the lingering Delta variant and the new Omicron variant surge through the United States.
With a caseload nearly twice that of the worst single days of last winter, the United States shattered its record for daily coronavirus cases, according to a report by New York Times on Thursday.
As a second year of living with the pandemic is drawing to a close, the new daily case total topped 488,000 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, adding that Wednesday's seven-day average of new daily cases, 301,000, was also a record, compared with 267,000 the day before.
"In the past week, more than two million cases have been reported nationally, and 15 states and territories reported more cases than in any other seven-day period," said the report.
The new peak in cases comes as the Omicron and Delta variants are spreading throughout the country simultaneously.
The United States is seeing over 1,500 daily deaths, although that's less than half the highs seen in Jan. 2021, which exceeded 4,100 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated.
"The rapid increase of cases we're seeing across the country is, in large part, a reflection of the exceptionally transmissible omicron variant," Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a White House briefing earlier this week. "While our cases have substantially increased from last week, hospitalizations and deaths remain comparatively low right now."
While the president vowed to provide 500 million more testing kits to be distributed in January, that has come too late for the holiday season, when millions of Americans travel to see relatives nationwide.
"It's clearly not enough. If we'd have known, we'd have gone harder, quicker if we could have," Biden said in an interview with ABC news, but added that he didn't view this as a failure.
Chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN Monday that testing could be better, after repeated warnings from experts for months that there aren't enough tests available to the public.
"Obviously, not making any excuses for it: we should have had more tests available," Fauci said.
All this could hurt Democrats in next year's midterm elections, and give ammunition to Republicans who have lambasted Biden for what they said was a failure to achieve his number one task -- to defeat COVID-19 and get the country fully back to normalcy.
Joe Biden claimed he would shut down the virus, but a year later he failed to do so and says there is no federal solution to COVID-19, the GOP tweeted.
Clay Ramsay, a researcher at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told Xinhua that criticism of Biden's lack of tests is "a legitimate criticism of the administration."
Source: Xinhua