Biden to outline strategy for controlling delta variant

President Biden on Thursday will outline additional steps his administration is taking to get the coronavirus pandemic under control as cases and hospitalizations increase in pockets of the country.

Biden will deliver remarks laying out what a White House official described as a six-pronged strategy to slow the spread of the highly infectious delta variant and boost vaccination rates.

“As the President has said since day 1, his administration will pull every lever to get the pandemic under control,” the official said in a statement.

Biden indicated last week following an underwhelming jobs report that his administration is looking for ways to make it safer for kids to return to school and for workers to return to the office.

Cases dipped dramatically and the nation appeared to be turning a corner in the early weeks of summer, but as the delta variant has become the dominant strain, cases have exploded across the country and the president has since struggled to get the pandemic back under control.

Biden and other White House officials have repeatedly described the situation as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” pointing to statistics that breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals remain rare and hospitalizations are extremely rare for those who have gotten the shot.

The Washington Post COVID-19 tracker found that hospitalizations on Labor Day in 2021 reached 99,270 individuals, a sharp increase from 38,192 people in 2020. The U.S. this week surpassed 40 million confirmed cases of the virus since the pandemic began.