New York City has modified its plans for its fully vaccinated New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square, limiting the crowd to roughly 15,000 people, nearly four times less than the non-pandemic crowd, and requiring masks for all amid an omicron surge that's spawning unprecedented increases in COVID infections.

As eye-popping as the numbers have been in recent days, Thursday afternoon's report from the state was still stunning -- 38,835 positive tests in just one day, an increase of 10,000 from the day before. Of those, 22,208 were in New York City alone, orders of magnitude greater than anything either the city or state faced before omicron.

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Against that backdrop, Mayor Bill de Blasio was under heavy pressure to do something about the city's New Year's Eve plans. The mayor said Thursday that viewing areas will be filled with fewer people to allow for social distancing.

Visitors will not be permitted entry until 3 p.m. on New Year's Eve, which is much later than prior years. Proof of full vaccination -- meaning the last dose of the regimen was at least 14 days before New Year's Eve -- with valid photo identification will remain required as the mayor had previously announced.

These are bittersweet days for Tim Lorang, or “Santa Tim,” as he is known among the local ranks of professional Santas.

Lorang, who, with his snow-white beard, gentle baritone and bearish mass looks like an escapee from a colorized version of “Miracle on 34th Street,” is retiring this year from a part-time gig he has (mostly) relished since answering a Craigslist ad a decade ago.

But the swan song of Santa Tim has had its sour notes, as one might expect of a public-facing seasonal worker during a resurgent pandemic.

Lorang, an e-commerce and marketing consultant, purposely underbooked the window from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, the traditional busy season for professional Santas, so that he and his wife, Linda Parker, aka Mrs. Claus, could gently wind things down.

Variants are a little bit like breakups: There’s never a great time for one to strike, but there absolutely are terrible times. With Omicron, it’s hard to imagine a worse possible moment. The promise of this holiday season has long been that Americans would finally get to make up for all the getaways and family reunions that didn’t happen last winter. That’s exactly what Americans have been banking on: The country is entering its biggest travel moment of the entire pandemic.

Omicron introduced itself to the world only a few weeks ago, but it’s made quite an impression. In the United Kingdom, COVID-19 cases hit an all-time record on Thursday. And Friday. There’s much we still don’t know about the new strain, but as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, we know enough to see that Omicron is about to tear through the United States. Here, Omicron cases are now doubling every two days, and the variant’s contagiousness—and knack for duping our vaccines—is ratcheting up breakthrough infections. Sports leagues have started rescheduling games, restaurants are closing for a little while, and some schools are going remote.

All of this has left many would-be travelers nervously glancing at their calendar and asking themselves another round of terrible pandemic questions: How bad will things be by Christmas? By New Year’s? And when do things get so bad that I need to cancel my holiday plans?

Whether you should travel over the next couple of weeks is not something Americans are getting an easy answer to at the moment. So far, the CDC is plowing forward with the same old guidelines: If you’re fully vaccinated and not experiencing any COVID symptoms, mask up and off you go. Anthony Fauci and other public-health figures, while urging caution with Omicron, have been reluctant to tell people to stay home. Unlike last year, when virtually no one was vaccinated and the CDC point-blank told Americans not to travel, the fuzzy messaging comes in part from the fact that so much now depends on people’s individual situations—whether they’re vaccinated, what precautions they’re taking, and whom they’re going to see. This year, everyone has to make a choice all on their own.

Jerusalem (CNN)Israel is to begin rolling out a fourth dose of the coronavirus vaccine with immediate effect for people ages 60 and over, medical workers and people with suppressed immune systems, the Prime Minister's Office announced Tuesday, following a recommendation from the country's panel of coronavirus experts.

Those eligible for the fourth dose can receive it provided at least four months have passed since the third dose, it said. In Israel, almost all vaccinated citizens have received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

One of the members of the expert panel told Israeli radio Tuesday evening that the decision to recommend a fourth dose had not been an easy one.

"We don't really have data yet on the level of immunity, like we did when we decided on the third dose, but on the other hand, there is really scary data out there in the rest of the world, Professor Galia Rahav said.

Bill O’Reilly told NewsNation that he had to comfort former President Donald Trump after a crowd booed him for getting a vaccine booster shot.

Said O’Reilly: “”I told him that today, he called me. I said ‘This is good for you, this is good that people see another side of you, not a political side, you told the truth, you believe in the vax, your administration did it, and you should take credit for it, because it did save, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of lives.’”