California will set aside 10% of the doses of Covid-19 vaccine that will be used for teachers and child care workers in an effort to resume face-to-face education, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday.
Focused assignments will begin with a baseline of 75,000 doses and this number will be maintained as the minimum number to be reserved for educators each week.
Newsom accredits the visibility of a three-week supply expectation set by the government to give the state zero confidence in a specific subset of the eligible. Over the next two weeks, the state expects to receive about three million doses of vaccine, which will be administered to 1,100 locations in California’s 58 counties.
As for the vaccines planned this week, some 702,000 doses were delayed due to the extreme weather elsewhere in the country. “Not many would arrive today,” Newsom said. Most of these doses were from Moderna, but some doses of Pfizer have also been delayed.
“Seriously, it’s not unique, unlike in California, some ways will probably go a little better than many other parts of the country, but 702,000 doses have been affected,” Newsom added.
In response to the governor’s proposal to resume face-to-face learning, California lawmakers launched their own version of a plan to return children to classrooms, which includes reaching a case rate of just seven cases for each 100,000 residents, a threshold that Newsom believes is too low. .
His proposal suggests a return to school buildings once the case rate is less than 25 cases per 100,000 residents. Both proposals include more than $ 6 billion in funding and are planned to provide personal protective equipment and aim for younger K-K students in second grade to return to first grade, followed by third- to sixth-graders.
“We can do that, we can keep people safe,” Newsom said. “We can protect our students.”
Meanwhile, California has released new guidelines that allow children to resume outdoor competitive sports, including contact sports such as football, rugby and water polo.
Testing will be required for those who practice contact sports and will be limited to children 13 years of age or older and living in counties with a case rate of less than 14 per 100,000. They will be able to resume next Friday, Feb. 26, Newsom said.