President Joe Biden laid out his strategy to fight the coronavirus as the highly contagious Omicron spread across the globe with winter coming and hours after the first known US case of community transmission of the variant was reported.

With authorities around the world scrambling to contain Omicron, Biden warned in no uncertain terms that infections will rise this winter.

“We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” he said, speaking at the National Institutes of Health medical research facility in Maryland.

US President Joe Biden media address on Omicron response:

New York has found five cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant, its governor said, becoming the fourth US state to detect the variant and bringing the total number of infections in the country to eight.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul told a news conference that one of the cases involved a 67-year-old Long Island woman with mild symptoms who had recently returned from South Africa.

The woman had some vaccination history but it was not yet known how many doses she had received. Further information was not yet available on the other four people, all New York City residents, Hochul said.