Jen Psaki said Monday that the president’s speech is not “about locking the country down.”

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Jen Psaki said Monday that the president’s speech is not “about locking the country down.”

Instead, he will announce a plan to set up testing sites across the country, partly modeled on the Federal Emergency Management Agency-run vaccination sites the administration deployed during its vaccination campaign, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized. The president will also detail steps to bolster hospitals’ capacity to treat patients as health officials expect them to be inundated in the coming weeks.

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While many people experience only mild symptoms from omicron, and vaccine boosters appear to protect against severe illness, administration officials and allies are bracing for the new cases to swamp hospitals and health centers, many of which are already struggling with a siege of delta cases after two years of fighting the pandemic.

“It’s going to be a surge like we haven’t seen before, numbers that are completely out of control,” former White House adviser Andy Slavitt said on MSNBC on Monday.

Biden is expected to emphasize that while fully vaccinated Americans who have received their booster shot may still get infected by the more transmissible variant, they are likely to experience mild symptoms — a sharp change from earlier this year, when the administration said breakthrough infections were rare and the country was on the precipice of declaring freedom from the virus.

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