 Yeah, and I got a shirt. Oh, hold on one second. Do you have a USB? Not on me. Sorry. I didn't think of it. No, I do, but not today. That's sure. And you can just go to structure. Of course. What is it being so weird? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I'm just going to go to Facebook. Yeah. Click more. Scroll it down. I like move it down. Oh, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're ready. Go to Facebook. Quick. More. Yeah. And we'll just, well, we won't go live. We'll just do a test. Next. Oh, wait. We already messed it up. All right. Cancel it. Yeah. Or close it. Yeah. All right. Or. Stop live streaming. Yeah. Whatever that is. Okay. I love on Facebook. Okay. There. And then. There you go. And then I sent you the. The title and then the description of it. So just copy and paste. Yeah. To. No. Yeah. Yes. And then once the title and the description. Then you can go live. Yep. But right now. We're not doing that. Yeah. So you can close it off and just stop the live stream. Okay. I'm going to show you how you do that. That's it. Like. 157 or 158. The life stream. Morning. Morning. Start the life stream. Okay. I'm going to share the county seal. And I just show up for like 30 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be here. Okay. So. I'm going to stay. I'm going to take one. Two. When this is over. Okay. You want, I can even be in. Just like. I'll do that. I'll join right now. So you can. Okay. You. Hello. Hey there. How are you. Excellent. I'm at the back. For today. Excellent. This is the first step to you disappearing completely. Isn't it? All right. We're looking forward to. Okay. Yeah. Hey, Dr. G. I was going to announce your, uh, your town hall with an issue at the top. If that's okay. It's part of the intro. I don't know if he's actively listening. He's logged in, but probably doing something else. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if he's actively listening. He's logged in, but probably doing something else. I just cut the other people off. I'm back. I'm here now. No, that's all right. Hey, is it okay if I announce your town hall with an issue? Oh yeah. Yeah. Please do. All right. I will do that. It might be a pretty slow day. We'll just have. Wait till Gail jumps on, but. Just a second. She was just in my office. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to pull up the talking points. I put your thing on there, Dr. G. What you said, hopefully. Yeah. About what I said last night, you mean? Yesterday, it was in huddle yesterday about us, um, being able to vaccinate old Santa Cruz County residents in a couple of months. If our vaccine ship, you know, come through our vaccine supplies come through. Right. And, uh, I do have some updated numbers. I'll use those. I think if I can get my, for some reason, Excel is not cooperating now. I think I. Overloaded it. With some of those bigger, um, you know, spreadsheets take a while to load now. Yeah. Yeah, I'm keeping it on my own hard drive now. So, um, that has been a problem. It's 60 or 70 megabytes now. But now it doesn't seem to want to open on my, I'm going to try my laptop. Um, my understanding is Kaiser's giving out statements still, although I think actually KSBW said they were going to talk to them about their mass vaccine site. So I figured if they were only giving out statements, we'd be asked a lot of questions because they couldn't ask them of Kaiser, but maybe that's loosened up today. So, but I would expect something about that. It looks like, I mean, we can have Gail do the. The tier case rates. And then Dr. G, if you want to do the. If it is. We've run into a number of. Vaccinations and then goes, sure. Quickly into questions. I don't know how busy it's going to be today. Honestly. Okay. I know there was at least one person who was. Asking or reached out to me, who was, oh, it was Aaron gruff. Oh yeah. So he was anticipating being on. And our allocation went up. Let's see if I can find that. Yeah, look at that spreadsheet Mimi sent. And I didn't, I mean, said Kaiser was getting 200, is what I thought, right? 200, no, that doesn't sound right. Yeah, Santa Cruz is looking at close to 6,000 doses. So that's, I think almost double our average. That's good. No Johnson and Johnson though. I'll be next week. Yeah, they told us to expect a delay on those. The state got some Johnson and Johnson, but not all counties. Yeah, it looks like mostly the big counties are getting it. Kaiser got 9,000. Oh, they did. Oh, really? Okay. Oh, they sure did. Yeah. Kaiser got 9,000 of J and J and 92,000 of Pfizer and 57,000 of Moderna. Crazy. They're getting 160,000 this week. They're weekly allocation ongoing is like 150,000. Mimi, you're quiet again. Barely hear you. We gotta fix your computer. It's cause I just got off a go-to meeting. Okay, let me try some things. All hands on deck. Maybe restart or. Maybe restart to five IT guys over there. Yeah, right. Yesterday I had to go home because I kept getting cut off every time I switched platforms. Okay, let me figure this out here. I will change my. Is there an equity section today on the talking points? You know, I kind of put it in with the vaccines where it talks about that we've reached 2 million and that of the lowest quartile and then we expect to reach 4 million in the next two weeks. It's at the bottom of the vaccine section. Oh, okay. Maybe we can. And then, you know, once we have 4 million shots in arms that it will change the metrics of the blueprint making it less restrictive for us to move through the tears. Thank you. So how do I sound different now? Is this better? It's about the same. No, not really. Okay, let me try a different input. So calling it out. I thought it fit better within the blueprint because it seems to me that how we're doing in our health equity quartile directly affects where we land within our blueprint status. Pio, if you think it should be moved somewhere, that's fine too. All right, how's this? That's better. Okay. So this is the one to use with Zoom. Hey, what? Well, I guess not here. On that possible giant dipper train. Shoot. If we were to do a photo shoot next week, I'm assuming, you know, trying to get 24 public health staff in one place for a quick shoot is going to be difficult. Lunch hour seems like the best shot. Is other days that are better? This is your five minute warning. Thank you. Thank you. We could share some time on email. Yeah, I was going to say I don't think lunch matters. So much. Does it? I think if you say, I'm going to show up at two o'clock to take a picture. People will show up. Yeah, we'll have to cancel something to go to it. But, so I'd say pick a day and we'll work around it. Okay. Yeah. Nobody goes to lunch around here and on Emeline. There's no place to eat. That's true. There's no time between meetings. The food carts were also a casualty of the pandemic, I believe. The food trucks. The food trucks. I remember the whole, like when I didn't even know you, Jason, and you're like, I'm not the food truck person. They're like, we want something other than hot dogs. Like, I understand, but I don't know. You can't have a hot dog truck in front of the clinic. I saw that hot dog truck on a bike ride the other day in Corlitos and I was telling my husband about how you were getting so upset because everyone was calling you about all the food trucks and the food available. That's before I even knew Jason Hoppin. Well, that's Mary. You don't have to go far now. You can bring it up with her. Mimi, do you want to? Oh, yeah, I wanted to know our game plan. Yeah, I'm fine with not talking and having it sounds like the two things that we're focusing on our. Situation status, blueprint status and vaccinations. Yep. Yeah, I cut the other a lot of the other stuff out because it was redundant over the last few weeks. And I'll just stay in the background. I'm sure there will be questions that you can jump in on, but it sounds like Dr. Noah can start and Dr. G can do. Well, I would say have Dave do most of page two and Mimi do most of page three. Mimi, talk about our TPA agreement. Yeah, I got my turn coming up about OptumServe DevLink, all this stuff on the last page. You're not you're not working off the great didn't. Yeah, there's a new one. Those are not the right talking points. Right. They're the ones that were on the top of my when I put in from Corinne. I sent them today. You guys, it says March 18th on them. Yeah, 31821 final. Is that what you have, Gail? I sent him to Nikki and Nikki printed it for you. I know I was going to read him off the screen this time, so I'm not looking down. But I just emailed them to you again. Dr. Yeah, they say 318 final on them. Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine with page two. And if if Mimi is OK with page three. There isn't a page three, though. I mean, those that's a page three. There's a page three. I see a page three reference as far as the number of vaccines. No, it's like Kaiser, Kaiser, OptumServe, TPA. Yeah, those are the three main points. Kaiser, TPA and let me see the right one. Did I I sent them right? You know what? They are looking at the last few bullet points on the vaccine under the vaccine heading. So that is on page. Oh, OK, all right. Yeah, if you want that to be to cut off, that's fine. You want to do that? Yeah, yeah, that's fine. OK, I'm sorry. Jason added those that weren't in my head. I pushed added stuff. I made it longer. Oh, OK. Yeah, we might as well say to everybody that we're going to put the TPA on the agenda on Tuesday. Mimi. OK, yeah, I'll do that. Questions about it anyway. So OK. Oh, I see that. I see the bullet point says that. Does that look all right? We did receive assurances that we will have input and distribution. So we did. No. We're going to have our one minute warning here in a second. So we're all set then. I'll pop off. Do you think it's important to mention this is your one minute warning? I am starting the live stream and Jason, you can start writing to. Thank you. All right, we're starting to see some people trickle in. So let me welcome everybody to our weekly health care leadership press conference. We have Dr. Newell, Director Hall and Dr. Gillarducci with us today on this drizzly afternoon. I do have a quick programming announcement for the public and Dr. Gillarducci will be joining Representative Anna Eshoo, who will talk about congressional response to the COVID pandemic tonight at 6.45 p.m. If you would like to sign up to be part of that town hall, I'll go to you. It's v-k-o dot com v-e-k-e-o dot com slash rep Anna Eshoo. R-e-p-a-n-n-a-e-s-h-o-o. And again, that'll start at 6.45 this evening. If you want to sign up and be part of that town hall, go to that URL and put in your information. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Newell to lead us off to talk a little bit about where we are with our numbers. Thank you, Jason. And thank you to all the press and our community members watching and to our friends at Community TV for making this possible. Lots of continued good news this week, locally, nationally, globally. We continue, at least across this country, to see downward trends slowing, of course, now that we're approaching these low, low numbers. On Tuesday at noon, the usual Tier Tuesday data was released and it was continued excellent news for us with a case rate of 5.1 per 100,000 per day over a seven-day average adjusted by our testing to 3.4, which puts us squarely into orange metrics. Our positivity rate is lower than we've seen in many months, if ever. It's at 1.2 percent countywide. And in our health equity quartile, it's at 2.5 percent. And those are yellow and orange metric measurements overall. So we're in excellent shape to move from the red tier to the orange tier after our required three weeks in the red tier. So we expect to hear on March 30 that we will be moving officially to the orange tier the following day on March 31. So we're continuing to do so well that we're essentially guaranteed bar any unexpected developments. That is even stronger possibility in light of the state's equity metrics. So if you'll all remember, the governor announced that his goal was to vaccinate four million people in the lowest health healthy places index zip codes in the state. So the the Q one quartile one with the lowest healthy places index measurements, those zip codes are the focus of 40 percent of our states vaccine supply. We have none of those codes in our county. But once we reach two million vaccine doses, the framework for the blueprint tiers shifted somewhat, expanding the red tier up to a 10. So instead of being a case rate of four to seven, it went all the way up to 10. And when we get to four million in those zip codes, then that will shift even further impacting all of the tiers. And that would mean that the orange tier would change to a range of two to five point nine, two point zero to five point nine, which would mean we're already in that orange metric. Even if this happens, we will not shift out of the red tier until the 30th. But it just strengthens our progress in moving toward the orange. We've also heard that on April 1st, there will be new guidelines going forward, allowing expanded openings in amusement parks and in live entertainment settings. And we heard today on the call with leadership that that would be expanding. I guess it was last night we heard about that, expanding to include events like graduations. So very shortly, there will be new guidance being released, including events like graduations, outdoor graduations into that live entertainment sector. It will be changed into a live outdoor events guidance. And that will allow more things to open as well. And then we've also heard that June 1st, there will be guidance that will take effect on June 1st about sleepover camps. So looking forward to some happy summer times for California youth. It would be in state folks only. And so I'm happy to answer more questions during the Q&A period around that shift in blueprint tier metrics based on that equity quartile. Of course, here locally, we are still focusing on our lowest healthy places, index quartile census tracts, even though we don't have a zip code. And so just a reminder that that's most of the Watsonville area east of Highway 1 and also some areas of Live Oak and Beach Flats. And we continue to work hard to ensure that those populations in particular, which have been the hardest hit by COVID-19, also received the most resources in terms of not just vaccination, but testing, messaging, media and outreach. And with that, I think I will turn it over to Dr. Gilarducci to give us some news around vaccinations. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Newell. Yes, good afternoon, everyone. So our vaccination progress continues to go very well. Really quite pleased with how we're doing. Let me give you some numbers to start with. First of all, we have given in Santa Cruz County to Santa Cruz County residents about 120,000 shots in arms. And this represents 35% of our eligible population. So we're well over the one-third mark just two months into this. So that's really exciting. Actually, I guess closer to three months into this at this point. The other thing that's exciting is that for our most vulnerable population, the 75 and older, we've hit the 84% mark. And if you're 65 and older, we've hit the 76% mark for at least one shot in those groups. So we think that the winter surge that we experienced if there were another surge coming our hospitals and these vulnerable folks both in our nursing homes and in our community elsewhere are protected. So that's a big sigh of relief. And so we're gonna continue making progress going there. Our current projections at the current rate of vaccination is we will have given everybody who's eligible in Santa Cruz County a shot by September 7th of this year. We expect that date to actually move up significantly because we're hearing that vaccine supply is going to improve. And that's the only thing holding us back. We are prepared to triple our capacity to give shots and arms. And this is really again, a big shout out to all of our volunteers to all of our healthcare partners including Kaiser who is running a large clinic this week and starting up on the Kaiser arena. We're, you know, dignity, health, Dominican Watsonville Hospital and Sutter who's been just a huge partner in getting our folks vaccinated. So on March 11th, a little bit about our eligibility. On March 11th, California Department of Public Health added some more occupational sectors to phase one B tier one that includes utility workers, disaster service workers, social workers, public transit workers, janitors, couriers and people experiencing homelessness including those working in high risk congregate setting as well as library staff. So that includes a large group of people that will continue to vaccinate in the occupational sectors under tier one. In addition, on March 15th, Monday this week, healthcare providers are now allowed to use their clinical judgment to vaccinate individuals between 16 and 64 with high risk medical conditions or with other disabilities that put them at risk for severe illness or death. I wanna note that as far as our vaccines go, we've given so far, we've given about a little over a thousand of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and then of course the rest are Pfizer and Moderna. It's important to emphasize that all three big vaccines are equally effective in clinical trials preventing severe illness or death. They're all effective in keeping you out of the hospital and they're all very important tools going forward. As I said before, vaccine supply is expected to ramp up in April. And as I said, we are working with our healthcare partners to triple our capacity going forward. We're just waiting for the vaccine to arrive at this point. If this supply comes through as we anticipate, I mentioned the September date as the projections right now, we actually expect with tripling capacity that we would be done in two months, which would just be amazing. By mid to late spring, we will have offered vaccine to every eligible person 16 and over in Santa Cruz County. And I think that's just tremendous. We did have a large vaccines vaccination clinic today where we vaccinated over around a thousand people and one day using 10 lanes. We had one of our prominent supervisors come through yesterday. It was a very successful event. Right now it's by appointment only. There are some issues with some of the signup things that we're working through, including with my turn. And so we'll keep you posted as we go through that. So I think at this point, I'd like to ask Director Hall if she would give us the rest in terms of what Kaiser is doing and what's happening with our third party administrator. Sure, thank you, Dr. Newell and Gillard Dutty. I would like to get into Kaiser and the third party administrator, but first I wanted to talk a little bit about vaccine equity and the progress that we're making. The state does have a dashboard that tracks vaccines by ethnicity and age. They're unfortunately not incredibly useful or reliable because the data that's used to go into that isn't very high quality data and the way the questions are posed, it's very, very difficult. There's a large other and a large multi-race section that it's very difficult to determine what groups those people fall into. So what we've done is we know that from a healthy places index perspective, primarily the largest number of vulnerable census tracks fall in the 95076 zip code. And so Dr. Gillard Dutty has taken quite some time to create some graphics and collect data about vaccines given by zip code. And we know for a fact that beginning in December of 2020 when we first started disseminating vaccines, that about 20% of the vaccines in December went to the 95076 zip code. We've made significant progress. And now by March, and we're not even done with March, but for the month of March, almost 30% of the vaccines disseminated have been to the 95076 zip code. So we know that equity is an issue. It's difficult when you don't have good data to back up the progress that you're making. But what we do know is that we continue to seek a number of ways to give us good feedback about where we're focusing our vaccination efforts. And the data that we do have shows us that we are making great progress, especially in those most vulnerable zip codes that take into account things like ethnicity, income, access to healthcare, and many other factors. So regarding the Kaiser site, Dr. Gillard Dutty did talk a little bit about the Kaiser site. And Kaiser released some information earlier this week that they're having the mass vaccination site in the county at the Warriors Arena. We wanted to remind everybody, there's been so much talk about it and much communication to our health department about this. And so as a reminder, it's a soft rollout. It's not fully launched yet. And it is not a site where people can just walk up and receive a vaccination. So please be patient. And you can go to our website and we have the link to Kaiser on our vaccine website so that folks can make an appointment. Even though it's a soft rollout this week, they do anticipate that they're going to have regularly scheduled vaccine clinics seven days a week once they work out all the kinks and pilot it this week. So many of you have heard for the last few weeks that the state is moving to Blue Shield as the single third-party administrator for allocating vaccines to counties, MCEs, and all points of vaccination. And so we've had our first meeting with Blue Shield and we've had a lot of review with our county council. And a lot of counties have had concerns about signing a third-party administrator agreement. So moving forward, we're happy to report that we'll be moving forward, not with an agreement with Blue Shield directly, but with a memorandum of understanding with California government operations. And most of the California counties are moving forward in this way. I think they're just a handful that have decided not to move forward in this way. And we've done that after receiving assurances that all the local health jurisdictions will have input on distribution since we are the entities that are primarily heading the equity efforts. So we really wanted to make sure that we had a say in where vaccine was allocated in each county and making sure it was directed towards the most vulnerable populations. So we look forward to that agreement going before our Board of Supervisors next Tuesday, March 23rd. And then finally, we wanted to let the public know many who are in the eligible occupations, phase B and phase, I mean, phase one B, over 65 and phase one B occupations, which have now increased, have been using the opt-in surf sites for their vaccines. So members of the public may have been finding it somewhat difficult to receive an appointment for the month of March. And the explanation for that is the opt-in surf site will only be providing second dose vaccines for the remainder of the month of March. And the reason for that is we had such a great kind of out the gate vaccination success. So we have thousands of first doses that had been administered two, three and four weeks ago that have to be caught up in a timely manner before we can begin another set of first doses. So please be patient. Those clinics will be taking second dose appointments only and then beginning in April, they will be launching through My Turn. So make sure that you are all signing up on myturn.ca.gov. And when more opt-in surf appointments open up in Santa Cruz County or the location of your choice, you will get that update. And that being said, please go to check SantaCruiseHealth.org slash coronavirus vaccine regularly because the situation changes almost daily in terms of who's providing vaccine, how much vaccine, who's eligible and it's much, much too hard to provide those updates in a once a week press conference. So please be sure to check our site often. Thank you, Director Hall. We're gonna now move to the Q and A portion of the press conference. Like usual, raise your hand in the chat and I will call on you. I think actually we're gonna get started with a, oh, it looks like Dr. Gillarducci is answering Stephen's question in the chat. So why don't we go first to Mallory Pickett from Lookout Local. Mallory, unmute yourself and ask your question. Hi, I have a question for Director Hall about the sort of memorandum of understanding that you said the county signed with respect to with the California government operations about Blue Shield. Can you talk about how that is different from signing an agreement with Blue Shield or is this kind of what was expected Blue Shield is coming in and you are gonna be working with them? I wasn't quite clear on what exactly happened. So I hope that the outcome won't be different. So previously counties were asked by Blue Shield. Each individual health jurisdiction was to sign an agreement with Blue Shield so that they would be our point of allocation for vaccines. And there were, that was problematic for a lot of counties and really giving vaccinations is a public responsibility and a public obligation. And so some counties had issues that signing an agreement with a private entity was not correct. So many of the counties were more open to signing an agreement with the state government operations. And that way our agreement is with the state. The state holds their own agreement with Blue Shield and then that allows the same outcome to happen without counties have to being forced to contract directly with Blue Shield or else not get their vaccine allocation. Thank you. Let's now go to Tony Nunez. Tony, go ahead and ask your question. Hi, yeah, I have a, I think a pretty straightforward question but Dr. Newell and Dr. G, what is the main driver behind the low case counts that we're seeing not only here but also throughout California right now? Is it the vaccines or is it a combination of things if you could kind of give your medical opinion? Thank you. Thanks, Tony. What our epidemiology experts both locally and at this state say is that we're not sure yet also at CDC. So we think that perhaps the vaccine is playing a role. Certainly we're not seeing the surge that Europe is seeing now where the EU didn't procure vaccine in a timely fashion and is now having a very large third surge, unfortunately. So it may also be that there's a seasonal component to this virus and we just don't know enough about that yet. It may be that we all are behaving better after the holidays and more of us are wearing our face coverings and not mixing with others as much. So we'll learn more with time and history will tell, I'm confident but at this point it seems to be multifactorial and uncertain. And I don't know if Dr. Aguilar Ducci wants to add anything else. Well, as usual, I completely agree with you. We don't, it's a little mystifying to be honest. But what we have seen is we've seen a pattern of waves and the modeling does not seem to indicate that. On the other hand, just recently we had the busiest travel day in airports than we've had since the beginning of this pandemic a year ago. So there's reasons to continue to be cautious. I think the vaccine effect is having most of its effect on our hospitals and admissions to the hospitals. Our nursing homes are not generating hospitalized patients like they were. But we don't have enough penetration into the community yet to expect a lot of difference in case counts at this point. I'd like to re-emphasize the point that Dr. Aguilar Ducci made and that is that we all need to continue to be very careful. It is not yet time to behave any differently other than some of the very strictest CDC guidance that says we may gather in small private groups with other fully vaccinated people. So these are only private gatherings. It shouldn't be changing how we behave in the workplace or out in large public events. Thank you. And before we go to the next question, Alice or Ian, could you check the Facebook feed? We have a report that it's down and I'm not showing it as live right now. I think we're gonna move on while they looked into that. The next question is from Melissa Hartman from the Sentinel. Melissa, go ahead and ask your question. Melissa, are you there? All right, we'll try Paul Rogers. Paul, hello, Paul. Go ahead and ask your question. Paul, you're muted. How about that? You're perfect now. All right, sorry about that. This is for Dr. Newell. Dr. Newell, as you know, on April 1st, the new state guidelines allow amusement parks to reopen at 25% capacity for counties in the orange tier. And I'm just wondering, given that Santa Cruz County is heading into the orange tier just before April 1st, if you have been in discussions with the beach board walk about their reopening, when you expect that to happen, and just in general, sort of if you have any concerns about that. We have been in discussion with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and are fully supportive of their efforts to reopen on April 1st. And there may be additional guidance allowing further opening beyond what's currently posted. That's what we've been told. So perhaps they'll be able to open a little bit further than is actually currently posted. But right now it would be to locals only to 25% capacity outdoor attractions only with advanced ticket sales. That's pretty limited, but I think the boardwalk is game to give it a try. And just to clarify, they're eligible to open April 1st. That doesn't mean that they will. Phil Gomez, go ahead and ask your question. Yeah, my question is, when are we gonna see this third entity, the Kaiser opening and we're providing the vaccinations or whatever they might be doing? Mimi, do you wanna take that? No, I can answer that, sure. So Kaiser has already been providing vaccinations to their own patients and people who aren't their patients in their Watsonville and Scott Valley locations, but the mass vaccination clinic site that they have announced, it's actually rolling out right now in a pilot phase for about a week. So listen to the news, you can still go onto our website to register, but in about a week's time, they expect to be fully operational. So seven days a week and I'm not sure we're allowed to talk about their capacity, the daily capacity, it's substantial. So we expect it to begin sometime next week. I would add that the state is allocating a significant number of vaccines to Kaiser on a weekly basis there. Their allocation has really gone up quite a bit. So we'll expect them to be a much larger player going forward. Thank you. And I'm gonna, Melissa Hartman was having some technical difficulties with the Zoom meeting. So let me go ahead and read a question from her. It says, if the statewide, this is for Dr. Hall to Mimi Hall, director Hall, if the statewide metrics for equity in vaccinations are not reliable, is there another source the media can seek out? We are seeking from, we're hearing from some advocates and community members of the Latino and indigenous populations. They feel there's other isn't enough priority being given to their groups still. Yes, we're hearing their concerns as well. And I agree with their concerns because from the very beginning of addressing the pandemic, we have looked at it through an equity lens. When you look at every single incident action plan that we have, the overarching objective is to address the pandemic through an equity lens. And so I think that it would be accurate to say there's never enough being done. However, I can say that nearly all of the efforts of the health department are surrounding those vulnerable populations who are most at risk. And that includes Latinx, that includes people over 65. And that includes all of our lower HPI zip codes. I can say without a doubt that that has been our focus not only for vaccinations, but for testing, for contact tracing. Everything that we have done to date has shown that we have focused on those populations. Does capacity, does supply, do all of these other factors impact the fact that we can't reach them all? Is it like, yes, of course. But I would agree with my partners that more could be done. We unfortunately are limited by our resources and our capacity and timing and competing interests, but the Latinx community and our South County communities have always been and will continue to be our priority. Thank you. Next up is Mallory Pickett. Mallory, go ahead and ask your question. Hi, yeah. This is for maybe Dr. Giladucci, I think might best speak to this. You said that Kaiser has increased their allocation a lot and we saw that Sutter is just now able to offer some more appointments. They said they got vaccine from their state and local partners. And I was just wondering what has been the relationship recently between the county and Sutter? How many doses has the county supplemented to Sutter and what's that back and forth been like? Right. Yeah, Sutter like many entities did see a drop in their vaccine supply to their main organization over the past couple of weeks, you noticed there was news about them having to cancel some clinics, people having to delay a little bit for their second doses. In Santa Cruz County, we've worked directly with our Sutter partners here and have actually allocated independent supply to them from our local healthcare jurisdiction allocation to keep that going. Our priority was to make sure that second doses happen when they were due. And so we've been able to accommodate that. Not every county's been able to do that. So I can tell you, my elderly mother had did not get an appointment here in Santa Cruz County was able to get hers in Santa Clara County but that one was delayed for about a week or so for the second dose. So going forward, we intend to continue to support them to the extent we can. Of course we do have other equity priorities that we wanna do, but in general when we're talking about two dose vaccines, our priority is always for the second dose clinics and there are times when we have to delay first dose clinics when there's not enough supply to do that. So again, it's an important partnership between all of us in the county and I think it's been working well. We've essentially we're all sharing a vaccine with one another and I think that's the most equitable way to do this. And I wanted to add a followup comment to what Dr. Gillarducci mentioned. I think that when some of the members of the public, especially those who are in the more vulnerable zip codes here that we're giving vaccine to Sutter or to Dominican, it's not only our own priority to prioritize second dose vaccines, it's the public health field, the CDC, the State California Department of Public Health tells us at the local level because it's best practice that the priority of every local health jurisdiction and every individual clinician should be to finish the vaccination series before starting new vaccinations. And so while it may appear that a number of vaccinations are going to a non-Latinx population, a lot of what we're doing right now is only second dose vaccinations and we're following up with those first doses for our phase one A healthcare worker populations and over 65, which are heavily weighted to be white. Yeah, and I would completely agree. I would just mention as Director Hall said earlier, our single biggest zip code that has received vaccine is the 95076, that's the Watsonville area. So we're proud of that. And that's despite the fact that we've had allocations that are not sensitive or geared toward an equity view. So despite those other priorities, which are important we've still managed to prioritize and emphasize the need to vaccinate our most affected populations. I would also add in full agreement with both Director Hall and Dr. Keeler-Ducci that when we do share our vaccine with Dominican and Sutter we also direct how that vaccine should be used if it's first dose vaccine. So for example, we have given Dominican Hospital several thousand doses that have been used to vaccinate agriculture workers in the South County at special vaccine clinics. And with Sutter we're able to set aside a block, a substantial block for example, 300 slots in a day of a thousand that we released to our South County partners to prioritize the folks that they work with in the most vulnerable populations. Just a quick note before we move on to the next question if there are any members of the press that wanna tour the fairgrounds mass vaccination site it's a very impressive operation. There's a line of cars out to the road. There's 10 lanes of vaccination. There's all kinds of supplies. There's all kinds of staff. It's super impressive. I'd be happy to arrange that and take you out there. Just let me know. I have another question from Melissa Hartman for anyone. Based on the progress made on vaccine rollout to date do you feel as though we will reach an age-based prioritization before President Biden opens the floodgates on May 1st and takes all adults eligible for an oculation? The age-based vaccination question. Well, I would like to speak with this because I had my twice weekly meeting with the Bay Area Health Officers this morning. Dr. Gilarducci was there with me as well. And two counties are moving to age-based. Solano moved to age-based on Tuesday including all 50 year olds to 64 year olds. So 50 and up. And Contra Costa announced that they also will be moving to age-based, the same age range, 50 and up starting Monday. And so that prompted us to look a little more closely at where we think we are in our occupation-based phase one B, tier one. And I would guess that when we have put another 20,000 first doses in arms that we'll be able to move to that age-based as well. So I would say perhaps in another two weeks. So the two counties that have moved that direction in the Bay Area feel that they have largely saturated everyone who's currently eligible which is why they're moving forward. Thank you. Why don't we go to Paul Rogers? Paul, go ahead and ask your question. Thanks. Just clarifying what we were talking about earlier with the Boardwalk. Dr. Noll, has the Boardwalk given you a date at which they're planning to reopen? They have not. We have discussed their eligibility beginning April 1st, but there haven't been a discussion of actual opening day yet. Mallory, go ahead and ask your question. Yeah, just a quick follow-up on the agreement with Blue Shield for Director Hall. I know that you said that it would go before the Board of Supervisors on March 23rd. And I was wondering if you anticipate any supply, any changes to the supply or allocation after that once that memorandum of understanding is signed? No, we don't. I mean, in general, we anticipate increases in supply, but it's not as a result of signing the memorandum of understanding. It's just, in general, supplies are set to increase. And my understanding is regardless of whether or not we sign the MOU, Blue Shield will still be allocating vaccine to counties. It solidifies our agreement as partners between the state, the counties, and Blue Shield. We're actually anticipating substantial increases in supply and we're hearing that from both the state and Blue Shield as they work together in the transition. Thank you. Do we have any other questions or does anybody have anything else they wanna ask? A couple more minutes here. Go ahead, Mallory. Yeah, I was wondering about the role of kids in herd immunity. I know there's some trials of the vaccines in kids. What percent, like, is anyone concerned about the kids not being vaccinated? For example, when school starts in the fall, going into a winter surge, are there any discussions about when vaccinations for kids might start and sort of how important is that if we think about the end of the pandemic? Maybe I can take the first stab. What I understand as far as the clinical trials that are happening with children, those less than 16, those are ongoing with several of the vaccines. And I haven't seen any projections of when those clinical trials will have enough data to be able to say that they could get an emergency use authorization from the FDA. One of the factors is there has to be a kind of enough disease within that subgroup in order to be able to detect a signal. In other words, you have to have enough prevalence of disease in that group in order to be able to say that the vaccine is effective in that group. Many vaccines when they are tested on kids are just looking at it from a safety perspective, but effectiveness can take longer. The school reopening does pose some risks of there being outbreaks at school. In fact, it would be, I think unusual if we didn't have one or two of those happen, but the school reopening guidelines are intended to contain those kinds of outbreaks that may happen to a smaller group of kids and not affect the entire school. So obviously we're gonna watch it closely. We'll be working closely with the County Office of Education and with each of the individual school districts. And if outbreaks do occur, we'll be jumping on those as quickly as possible to make sure that they don't spread beyond that. Great, and with that, I wanna thank everyone for joining us today. Have a safe drive home in this rainy weather and we'll see you next week.