President Joe Biden is planning to address the nation tomorrow (Tuesday Dec. 21) to share the outlook on the COVID-19 omicron variant. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Dr.  Anthony Fauci, the county’s leading infectious disease expert, said “the real problem” for the U.S. hospital system is that “we have so many people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who have not yet been vaccinated.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, Fauci told NBC that the president would urge Americans to have the booster shot, highlight increased availability of testing, and also discuss measures to provide relief to hospitals besieged with people sick with COVID-19.

“The one thing that’s very clear, and there’s no doubt about this, is its extraordinary capability of spreading, its transmissibility capability. It is just, you know, raging through the world, really,” Fauci said. “And if you look even here in the United States, you have some regions that start off with a few percent of the isolates that are positive, now going up to 30%, 40%, and some places 50%.”

The lingering COVID-19 pandemic has proven difficult for the Biden Administration. The reality of renewed mask mandates, Broadway’s shutdown, and hospitals filled with patients has reversed much of the optimism the president suggested 10 months ago when he suggested that the country would be back to normal by this Christmas.

“The idea about hoping and having an aspiration to be independent of the virus after a period of time is understandable and reasonable,” Fauci said. “But the one thing that we know from, now, almost two years experience with this virus is that it is really very unpredictable.”

For the latest on the coronavirus, check out BET’s blog on the virus, and contact your local health department or visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.