Hundreds of students left class on Tuesday in New York - a “walkout” in protest, organized in several schools at the same time.

The children and adolescents did not feel safe, their spokesman explained, when classes were due to start again after the holidays.

About ten percent of students and four percent of teachers at New York schools have recently tested positive for the corona virus, according to the health authority.

The students are therefore calling for a return to virtual lessons.

But the New York school board does not want to give in and hold on to face-to-face teaching, like many others in the country.

In the United States, there are increasing signs that authorities and politicians are relying on coexistence with the coronavirus in view of the skyrocketing number of infections, not just in schools.

The California state government decided this week that health care workers can return to work "immediately" if they test positive but are asymptomatic.

The virus "will find pretty much everyone"

Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief advisor on coronavirus, said Tuesday that the virus will "end up finding pretty much everyone". The unvaccinated will be hit particularly hard. Most people would get Covid-19, Janet Woodcock, acting chair of the national agency for nutrition and medicine, also said at a Senate hearing. In view of such forecasts, the government wants above all to ensure the functioning of the critical infrastructure.

The curve of the new infections in the national average is now practically vertical upwards - even if there was recently news from New York and New Jersey about a possible "plateau" of the omicron wave, which the New York Governor Kathy Hochul as a "glimmer of hope" designated.

Last week, an average of 754,200 people tested positive for the coronavirus nationwide every day.

The number of new infections has never been so high.

An average of 1,646 infected people died every day, a third more than in the week before.

According to the authorities, the Omikron mutant is now responsible for 98 percent of the infections.

The course of the disease could be milder with this variant.

But the mass of infections still puts the hospitals in distress.

Hospitals are overcrowded

There are currently around 146,000 Covid patients in a clinic in the United States, twice as many as two weeks ago. There are bottlenecks in supply especially where the number of people vaccinated is low - also because many hospitals in rural areas have been closed in recent years. If there was a lack of ventilators at the beginning of the pandemic, the problem is now more staff and bed shortages.

Earlier this week, the Virginia governor declared a state of emergency that would allow hospitals to top up their beds. New Jersey also reinstated a medically-justified emergency regime. The state of Kentucky mobilized the National Guard to help hundreds of hospitals and practices. In Texas one wants to counter the crisis with thousands of new hires - 2700 additional medical employees are to be employed. The bottlenecks also affect patients who have to go to the clinic for other illnesses - for example, to have an operation for cancer.

Many patients are only diagnosed with the Covid infection when they come to the hospital for other reasons.

New York doctors recently surveyed by the New York Times said between a third and a half of all admitted patients.

Nationwide statistics on such cases are missing, but they are included in the general infection and hospitalization data.

Most of the fatalities are unvaccinated

Doctors also report that mostly unvaccinated people die from Covid - and that they are younger than in previous waves, often between forty and fifty years old.

According to media reports, however, the number of those who have to go to hospital despite the corona vaccination is also increasing - this particularly affects people who would not have received a booster vaccination.

At least one in five Americans isn't vaccinated at all, that's 65 million people.

62 percent of residents have been immunized with one or two initial doses - but only 23 percent have received the booster so far.

According to experts, this is necessary in order to be adequately protected from serious and fatal courses in the event of infection with the Omikron variant.

In an interview, the former President Donald Trump appealed to his supporters, among whom there are many people who have refused to vaccinate.

Even politicians would have to say that they had been given the booster, Trump told the right-wing "One America News Network".

Everything else is "cowardly".

On the occasion, however, he also spoke out against vaccination obligations, as they had set Biden for the private sector.

Meanwhile, the disease control agency CDC released its forecast for the coming month.

According to this, more than 62,000 people could die after a Covid infection within the next four weeks.

To date, there have been around 843,000 deaths in the United States infected with the coronavirus.