My 93 year old parents just got their first shot of the Moderna. They were fine after it but I’ve warned them that the second one is a little rougher.

If I had a choice, i would take the day after off following the second vaccine. I was semi OK the day of the second, although i wouldn’t have piloted a plane. But the following day i had a procedure scheduled first thing in the morning and wished i could have stayed home. I slept 3.5 hours in the afternoon.
Glad you got vaccinated. I’m working on trying to get my wife in but she doesn't qualify based on age. From how it looks availability should increase in the next few weeks.

I got my mom, 87, in last week. She doesn’t have a computer and the phone system was overwhelmed. She went to Safeway and it was smooth as could be. AND she got a 10% coupon off her next shopping trip! Zero reaction; I’ll give her a heads up on shot two

I have a good friend who lives in Dixon. She was finally able to get an appointment but had to drive to Antioch to get her shot. To say the system is completely overwhelmed and undermanned at the moment.

As with the testing procedure, UCDMC has it figured out with the vaccine. I had a 10am appointment, walked in 20 minutes early, even with the post vacc wait time, i was back in my car by about 10:05. The multiple questions took longer than the wait for the vacc.

Too bad they didn't have over 7 months to prepare and a Harvard degree leading the system... oh, they did.

Congrats to UCDMC. I read a doc there saying "It's about getting vaccines in arms." As close to urgency as I've read.

thats really weird since they are different counties. I set my mom up through contra costa health and her appointment was at Safeway in Antioch, about a mile away. I heard they opened the Senior center there as a vaccine center and that seems to be moving smoothly

She made appointment the appointment through Sutter Health and Antioch was the closest availability for an appointment. Everything in the Davis surrounding area was booked so she took the appointment in Antioch.

My older brother lives in Florida and he just got his shot through the VA. Said his appointment was quick and easy. He loves the VA health care system. We hear so much about the VA falling short but he says his experiences have always been positive and he has had quite a few health problems.

There is so much misinformation about just what is going on with vaccinations. Sacramento County says only tier 1A which is some essential health care workers and residents of some care facilities, yet I know many whose only category is that they are over 65. They all got shots,...one couple already has had their second...and they all said no one ever demanded proof that they were in Tier 1A. Even saw people who appeared to be well under 65 (though I cannot say those people weren't frontline essential workers.) One person could not get an appointment but drove their spouse who had one. Clinic gave both of them shots and booked them both for No. 2. I try 20-30 times a day and can't get anywhere other than we're all booked, try another time.

Things going well at the VA? I don’t understand. How could a nationalized single payer health system outperform a network of 3000 county health departments entangled with a variety of for-profit hospitals and pharmacies in competition with each other?

Fug, you make a very subtle and powerful point. California is still going too slow. Why? I will say that california has a very decentralized public health system- basically every county is on its own. Why? No answer. Maybe An outdated vision that CA is just big to do to statewide health. I think very wrong now. They could start with regional areas built around the state Covid response program. Maybe around the UC/Stanford/USC/Loma Linda Health Systems which are statewide and built around the right population centers. IMHO

I don't think decentralization is unique to California or health. I think it is rooted in the 18th century where people wanted to be within a day's horse ride of their decision makers and wanted to make sure that their local tax dollars didn't leak out to help poorer areas. On one hand, the needs in Modoc County are very different than LA County, but at the same time, county lines are kind of arbitrary because Lancaster is very different than Long Beach. Our system relies on having qualified elected officials who are invested in the public good both hiring and listening to topical expert civil servants. In general, I think civil servants can do a better job when the politicians provide responsible funding and framework and then butt out of daily affairs, which I think other than habitually underfunding, the politicians do get out of the way of the VA's daily affairs. Historically not the case over at places like USDA and Department of Education because nothing brings politicians out of the sewer faster than perceived sleights to small business and organized religion, and those departments are a mess because of it. Interestingly in this case, thousands of health civil servants across the country have basically all said the same things, which has some perceived conflicts with small business and organized religion, so out come the politicians. And rather than a national approach with just one set of politicians interfering, this is a fragmented approach involving 50 governors and about 3000 boards of supervisors and sheriffs micromanaging. And what we've seen is that a lot of civil servants are actually better than we give them credit for, while a lot of politicians of any stripe are morons more concerned with personal reelection prospects and ego wars over jurisdiction than the public good. We have public and private sector experts in this country that could pull off this heavy lift, if only we would have liquored up the politicians and dropped them off at the Dixon corn maze while the adults figured things out. If anything, a couple of blind spots that the vaccine distribution has highlighted - we have a lack of domestic emergency access to raw materials and manufacturing and we have a lot of residents for whom we don't have a good means of contact to identify them and let them know their place in line.

A school district in Nevada (Las Vegas area?) seeking to get some students, with a priority for 'at risk', back to school sooner as suicide deaths for young people double.

Interesting story in the NYT over the weekend about how the university is basically trying to protect the entire city of Davis from the Covid virus. Big project and as the article says: “Big Science.” Davis has over 30% of the Yolo County population, but only 15% of the Covid cases. So, seems to be working. Sorry, cant link the story. Maybe someone else?

A California University Tries to Shield an Entire City From Coronavirus
The University of California, Davis, is providing free testing, masks and quarantine housing to tens of thousands of people who live nearby.
By Shawn Huber
Jan. 30. 2021
DAVIS, Calif. — The coronavirus test center on A Street was bustling on a recent morning. Michael Duey was in line, as usual, with his teenage son. Margery Hayes waited for her wife in the parking lot. Dr. Elizabeth Pham hustled her children in for a quick pit stop.
Inside, each received a five-minute screening for the virus, administered and paid for by the University of California, Davis. Yet none of them is associated with the school.
All last fall, universities across the country were accused of enabling the pandemic’s spread by bringing back students who then endangered local residents, mingling with them in bars, stores and apartments. So U.C. Davis is trying something different.
Rather than turning the campus into a protective bubble for students and staff, as some schools have attempted, it has quietly spent the past six months making its campus bubble bigger — big enough, in fact, to encompass the entire city.
Public health experts say the initiative is the most ambitious program of its type in the country and could be a model for other universities. U.C. Davis, part of the 10-campus University of California system, has made free coronavirus tests — twice weekly, with overnight results — available to all 69,500 people in the city of Davis and hundreds of nonresidents who just work there.
It has also trained dozens of graduate students to help with contact tracing; recruited hotel and apartment owners to provide free isolation and quarantine housing to anyone in town exposed to the virus; and hired some 275 undergraduate ambassadors to combat health disinformation and hand out free masks.
The university has also recently expanded campus wastewater testing into Davis, and in coming weeks plans to administer vaccinations at its coronavirus screening centers and to bring screening to some public school sites.
Funded by major philanthropic donations, state and federal grants and CARES Act money, the program, projected to cost up to $38 million, has caught more than 850 potential outbreaks in Davis since it got underway shortly before Thanksgiving, according to Brad H. Pollock, who chairs the university’s department of public health sciences and directs the project.
The mayor of Davis, Gloria Partida, calls the initiative “a big science project” that could help revive her pandemic-fatigued college town.
Students make up roughly a third of the population in Davis. As they have dispersed to study remotely, the campus and the town have not only suffered financial losses but also been drained of much of their life force. Bars are closed. Streets are still. Hotels, bereft of parents and conferences, are generating little in bed taxes.
“I know the university felt it needed to get this right to be able to open up,” Ms. Partida said. “But for the community — this is the key to us getting back to normalcy.”
Though vaccines have begun to roll out, epidemiologists say playbooks like the one in Davis — masks, distance, hygiene and, in particular, cheap, rapid tests to detect cases quickly — may be the only way to reopen schools and businesses in the near term until the nation achieves herd immunity.
Some schools last year used aggressive testing and tracing to bring students back into residence halls and classrooms, but their protocols typically stopped at the campus boundaries. Testing was so costly, slow and hampered by shortages of processing reagents that medical labs strained just to meet the demand at the universities.
Meanwhile, many students returned to their college towns even if they were not planning to live in the dorms, either because they could not break pre-pandemic leases or because they preferred not to study remotely from their parents’ homes.
Outbreaks erupted from off-campus parties, mass student gatherings, fraternity and sorority houses, athletic team dinners, even board games.
“We heard a lot of anxiety from our community,” Ms. Partida said, “about what a disaster it was going to be when the students came back into town.”
At the same time, the local economy was reeling. So was the university. Kelly Ratliff, its vice chancellor for finance, operations and administration, said that at last count, lost revenue stood at more than $80 million, due in part to drastically reduced room and board payments.
With students not scheduled to return until late September, the university decided to exploit its lead time. “We had a chance to observe some of the missteps at other universities and we were dead set on not making those same mistakes,” said the chancellor, Gary May.
Richard Michelmore, a plant geneticist who directs the U.C. Davis Genome Center, urged the university to let him try to create an in-house center for coronavirus testing by repurposing a $400,000 machine normally used to identify plant DNA for agricultural breeding.
Within weeks, Dr. Michelmore’s lab was able to screen thousands of samples per day accurately, at low cost and with overnight results. That set the stage for frequent, wide-scale screening of asymptomatic students and inspired health experts to propose a joint public health project with the city.
“What does it mean to keep your campus well when everyone else is getting sick around you?” said Dr. Pollock, the project director. “The university is part of the community.”
By August, the university had invested in a second testing machine and drawn up a plan to cover the cost of additional personal protective equipment and screenings if the city would provide test sites and staffing.
By mid-September, Dr. Michelmore’s machine was testing incoming students, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. In mid-November, with the costs down to just $6 per test, the first residents were screened at the Davis senior center. Since then, the project, known as Healthy Davis Together, has opened two more large screening centers in town.
The program also has deployed mobile screening centers and is processing tests for the University of California, Merced, and for employees and trainees at the U.C. Davis medical school campus in Sacramento. More screening kiosks are planned for elementary schools, which the city hopes can help pave the way for an in-person return to K-12 classrooms.
Dr. Pollock and others at the university are tracking results, with plans to publish findings not only in scholarly journals but in white papers that can share best practices more immediately.
Not everyone in the community has taken advantage of the program: About 35,000 people, or roughly half of the city, have come in at least once to be screened, and two-thirds of those were students or university employees, Dr. Michelmore said.
But he noted that participation had risen sharply since the holidays as more sites have opened. More than 160,000 tests have been processed, not counting diagnostic tests done for people with symptoms, and more than a half-dozen Davis residents have received free quarantine or isolation housing. The program has cost the university about $14.5 million, with about half of the money spent in town and half on campus, said Ms. Ratliff, the vice chancellor. She said the school expected the initiative to continue at least through 2021.
Though Davis has about a third of its county’s population, it has logged only about 15 percent of the coronavirus cases. That is partly because many in the college town can work from home. But it is also because of Healthy Davis Together, city officials and public health experts say.
“We’ve taken some 850 people off the street who were walking around, asymptomatic,” Dr. Pollock said. “Every infection caught prevents, like, three more infections. And for every one of those three, three more get prevented, and so on. That has to make a difference, right?”
Outside the test center, Mr. Duey, a web developer, said twice-weekly testing had made it possible for his 14-year-old son, Bowen, to spend time with friends from school and to attend remote classes in masks in one another’s backyards. It also enabled his wife, a nurse practitioner, to quickly isolate after she became infected in December.
Ms. Hayes, 71, and her wife, Paula Ash, 70, who were getting tested in advance of a vaccine appointment, said they had seen TV ads about the free tests produced by the university and had come at the behest of their daughter, a local teacher. Dr. Pham, a family physician who had already gotten the vaccine, saw the screenings as a way for her teenage sons to finally visit their grandparents, whom they have not seen in months.
“Hey, better safe than sorry,” said Marc Hicks, 54, a school district employee whose infection was caught in November three days before he experienced symptoms. The lead time, he said, enabled him to notify his supervisor at work and made it possible for contact tracers to identify people he might have infected. He still comes in every week, he said, because he cannot be sure whether he is immune or not.
Many at the test centers, however, seemed to treat the screenings as a neighborly errand, part of the new normal in an abnormal time.
“My wife and I are doing it weekly,” said Lucas Frerichs, the city’s vice mayor. “I went over not long ago, and one of the school board members was ahead of me in line.”
Shawn Hubler is a California correspondent based in Sacramento. Before joining The Times in 2020 she spent nearly two decades covering the state for The Los Angeles Times as a roving reporter, columnist and magazine writer, and shared three Pulitzer Prizes won by the paper's Metro staff.  @ShawnHubler
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 31, 2021, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: A University Tries to Bring an Entire City Into Its Protective Bubble.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/us/college-coronavirus-california.html?searchResultPosition=1

Marc Hicks is mentioned towards the end of the article. He was one of the best Davis High School football players ever.

Marc Hicks? He can't possibly be 54 now, can he? That would make me....never mind.

Here's a retrospectiuve on Hicks from the August 2017 Enterprise:
https://www.davisenterprise.com/sports/hicks-a-blue-devil-legend-looks-back/

Interesting how the NYT scooped both the DE and the Bee on this rather significant story. Very hard to find an upbeat story in these Covid times. But then the Bee thinks Davis is just a snooty title college town, so why bother? DE: no idea. . . .

Rolling 7 day average for US Daily cases have dropped from 246K cases on Jan 12 to 143K cases yesterday. Total hospitalizations have dropped from 131K on Jan 12 to 94K yesterday.

California has gone from 42.6K cases on Jan 14 to 17.5K yesterday and hospitalizations have dropped from 22.7K on Jan 12 to 15.2K yesterday.

Unfortunately deaths haven't dropped much at all yet but I'd expect those to start soon considering there's the delay from cases to deaths and we've been vaccinating the most vulnerable.

Of course, the caveat is that as good as it's trending right now and should continue, our second peak highs were only a rolling average of 66.5K new cases and just under 60K total hospitalizations. So while things are obviously trending in the right direction, we're still in a tough spot.

More positives: 26.6M people have already gotten one dose and another 6.2M have gotten both. We're averaging 1.34M doses handed out per day. I believe another vaccine will be coming soon as well.

The single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just 66% effective, but 85% effective against serious cases? Due out soon?

This has been discussed many times before, but the local newspaper scene is pretty dismal. A recent Bee article about the revised Big Sky spring football schedule appears to have been written by a writer who did little more than look at a computer. https://www.sacbee.com/sports/article248756715.html

Other than the Cal Poly game there is no mention of away games.

Not sure if this is because it's the off season or what we can expect as the Bee fights bankruptcy, but this article was "written" by a current journalism student at a local community college.

The Bee has sold its physical property in Sacramento and I believe the paper is now printed elsewhere and trucked to town.

Note that the NY Times article was written by a woman from Sacramento. Unclear if she still resides here. [As noted below, the article says the writer is in fact based in Sacramento.]

I read the writer's bio... looks like she was previously with LA Times and until recently, the Sac Bee. It says NYT "correspondent", which I think is code for a freelance journalist paid per article rather than a staff reporter paid a salary. I think the business model for online news and increasingly print news is just that... the reporters are gig workers and the news organizations are little more than editors/curators that buy articles. I would imagine in the Bee's case that they do not pay journalism students much if anything. I think new entrants to the career do a lot of pro bono work up front to build their portfolio and resume. Bully for the UCD press office for getting a connected journalist to this story. I think it shows that UCD can attract national attention when it shares something widely applicable. Far too many of the stories that Davis pushes are niche vanity projects that interest narrow corners of academia and the social justice movement. Normally I see these kinds of headlines in the UCD news feed - "A multicultural exploration of the intersectionality of paint and canvas in relation to implied sexism of paintbrushes" - the kind of stuff that ain't going to make the NYT.

When I wrote that I was thinking the bio at the end of the Times article said something about being from Sac so I hedged my bets... it clearly says she’s based in Sac. It’s a nice article and I’m glad for the good press for the school and the city.

From what I gather, we might see J&J vaccine hit pharmacies by March. While maybe not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna, perhaps the single dose and simpler handling will speed distribution. It uses an adenovirus (a common cold virus as carrier?) instead of mRNA. I believe it is similar to the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. I'm not sure I fully understand the mechanism, but maybe I don't need to.

This is also a story with some potential legs because it is so unique. Europe has many more small towns the size of Davis who could try to replicate this and which have a national health system to carry it out. None seem interested at this point. I cannot think of another similar city in this country which could do this or even had the will to try it either. Anyone thinking of moving back to Davis? Think again. Nothing available. Still waiting for the vac in Sonoma. . . . . . Davis, such a sorry lib town.

So much to love about it, but a friend said there are now over 400 homeless / drug users? And the campus / town seems split in half with our new demographics.

Movie, its a universal problem that the homeless and the drug abusers are attracted to cities and the more affluent the city the better for them. On a recent trip to Ireland on the first night our Dublin airbnb was broken into and a lot of our stuff including most electronics were stolen. It was all on CCTV and the dummies didn’t even bother to cover their faces. They were picked up the next day in line at the downtown methadone clinic one block from the heart of beautiful downtown Dublin. All the loot already sold. Crossing the River on all the bridges there were countless beggars, mostly Roma people, and most gave a bit, as did we. As we traveled to much poorer Western Ireland there was very little crime and no one asking for a handout. Yes, we need to address the homeless crisis in our country, but an humane way. Why not a trade: a universal basic income payment? OK then you have to stay off the street or be arrested. Basically thats what Germany does- don’t see many beggars there for sure!

Thank you for new insights & observations. I'm told Singapore has no problem.

Pay tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate citizens getting stoned & sleeping all day? Numerous studies are now proving early pot use can destroy up to 10% of an adolescent's IQ, not to mention increased rates of schizophrenia.

Someone convinced the Salseforce CEO to spend $3.5 M studying the homeless, and downplay drug use & mental illness. ... not humane to me to let schizophrenics & severely mentally ill live on the streets.

It seems like our decades long drug use culture, stronger marijuana, stronger, cheaper street drugs (LA AG says to thank the Mexican drug cartels), Open Borders (5M+ illegal immigrants in CA), and family breakdown have come home to roost.

Is the current Roma problem new?

No. Hitler tried too wipe them out. Did not succeed. Roma are a 500 yrear old people. Actually a very endearing people IMHO.