For students, deal is pay to not play

UC Davis will give $75 gift cards to those who avoid traveling for spring break.

No caravans of college students in Miami or beach parties in Malibu during a pandemic, please.

UC Davis is offering a surefire incentive to keep students from traveling during spring break and potentially spreading the coronavirus: money.

Students who agree to stay on campus during the break can receive $75 gift cards to spend locally, according to the university’s spring break grant program announcement last week.

“The idea behind this was to provide a positive incentive for students to follow public health guidance,” said Sheri Atkinson, associate vice chancellor for student affairs. “Based on how our students have done so far, we’re pretty confident that this group is conscientious and will do what they signed up to do.”

About 50% of the student body is living either on campus or in the Davis area, she said. To receive the gift cards, students must apply for the grant by giving a basic description of their spring break plans. They must pledge to stay in town for their weeklong break, beginning March 22, and complete a coronavirus test.

Health officials throughout the state have repeatedly cited insufficient supplies as their major obstacle toward more quickly and widely administering vaccines.

“All of us want to get the vaccine when it’s our turn, and everybody wants for it to be our turn today,” Newsom said.

The millions-deep queue of Californians eligible to be inoculated — which already includes people 65 and older, as well as essential workers in food and agriculture, education and child care, healthcare and emergency services — is set to further expand Monday, when those with qualifying health conditions can start reserving their places in line.

California is still finalizing the list of medical conditions that will qualify people under 65 for the COVID-19 shot starting next week, Ferrer said.

A state bulletin last month said that starting March 15 healthcare providers can use their judgment to vaccinate people ages 16 to 64 deemed to be at high risk for severe illness or death from COVID-19 because of health conditions such as cancer, chronic kidney disease, chronic pulmonary disease, a compromised immune system as a result of an organ transplant, Down syndrome, pregnancy, sickle cell disease, heart conditions, severe obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

Ferrer expects hundreds of thousands of additional people in L.A. County with underlying conditions will become eligible for the vaccine.

“Our numbers are likely to go down slightly on how many doses we get, but we’re going to have many more people that are going to be eligible on Monday,” Ferrer said. “So, again, I feel bad always asking everybody to be somewhat patient, because even though it is your turn, it’s still going to be hard to get appointments.”

Ferrer suggested that people with underlying conditions contact their healthcare providers to ask about getting the vaccine. “The easiest way for you to get vaccinated is going to be to go to your provider, or if your provider has an arrangement with a network, to get vaccinated,” Ferrer said.

The state has also classified the following groups as eligible for the vaccine: custodians and janitors; public transit workers; airport ground crew workers; social workers who handle cases of violence, abuse or neglect; and foster parents providing emergency housing for young people, Ferrer said. L.A. County is coordinating with unions and employers to set up vaccination sites and make appointments for these newly eligible groups.

Vaccine appointments for custodians and janitorial workers could be available at two large county-run vaccination sites as soon as Saturday and Sunday at the Forum in Inglewood and at the L.A. County Office of Education in Downey on Saturday.

The continuing cadence of vaccinations and declining coronavirus cases has pushed some counties, including L.A., to the verge of a wider economic reopening.

Once 2 million doses have been administered to residents in California’s most disadvantaged areas, the state will relax the threshold required for a county to move from the most restrictive purple category of the state’s four-tier, color-coded reopening roadmap into the more permissive red tier.

Newsom said it’s possible that the state could hit its 2million-dose target by Friday — positioning eligible counties to potentially begin lifting business restrictions as soon as this weekend.

It’s unclear at this point just how quickly counties will opt to move, however, as local-level health officials can keep stricter rules in place if they feel it’s warranted.

A topic of particular interest in L.A. County has been the potential resumption of indoor dining, which is allowed at limited capacity under the red tier. Indoor operations of restaurant dining rooms have been offlimits in the county since last July.

Ferrer has not specified how, or whether, the county’s rules might ultimately differ from what the state allows, as health officials are still discussing that with the Board of Supervisors and representatives from relevant business sectors.

“We’re working on the guidances for restaurants, for movie theaters, for personal care sites — all of which have really different opportunities while we’re in the red tier,” she said during a briefing Wednesday. “Those should be released tomorrow.”

If the county remains on the right path, Ferrer said entering the even more lenient orange tier could become a realistic possibility in as soon as a few weeks.

“It’s not just putting out new guidance, it’s having everybody take to heart the need to still take a lot of protections so that we keep each other safe,” she said.

Newsom signaled that state officials are working on an even more lenient tier. As the state gets closer to herd immunity, “we will start to make it clear that these tiers [are] temporary, they’re not permanent. And there’s something beyond orange, and yellow, and that green tier will present itself.”

Adding to the complexity of vaccination efforts, however, is the growing dissatisfaction among officials in counties that are being forced to use the state’s flawed My Turn appointment system to manage vaccinations.

Dr. Christina Ghaly, health services director for L.A. County, said adopting My Turn for the county’s public hospital system would disrupt her agency’s vaccination efforts.

Ghaly said her department would like to be exempted from any state requirement to use My Turn and continue to use its own electronic health record system to manage vaccinations, and later upload information to a state immunization registry. Shifting to My Turn would force clerks to enter data twice — once in the county health system’s database and again in the My Turn system, she noted.

Ghaly called My Turn a “wholly parallel and an unnecessary system.”

Ferrer backed Ghaly’s concerns. “Please don’t add a layer of complexity to healthcare providers that are already doing a good job,” Ferrer said.

The My Turn system has also been faulted for previously relying on access codes that were distributed to people in underserved communities. The codes leaked out, resulting in people from wealthier and predominantly white communities showing up at vaccination sites in lower-income and mostly nonwhite neighborhoods, undercutting efforts to target poorer areas with vaccinations.

People in the wealthiest communities in California have received double the vaccine doses of those in the poorest neighborhoods.