Only ~5% of California's long-term care facility residents have been vaccinated | Hacker News Reader

Only ~5% of California's long-term care facility residents have been vaccinated

latimes.com

42 pointsbelltaco72 comments

I will be curious how different executive leadership could resolve logjams like this. These things often have to do with bureaucracy, miscommunications between agencies, differing priorities between the stakeholders, and unclear overlapping responsibilities. IMO it’s the job of executive leadership to help clarify these things regularly - especially when you should basically be on a war footing trying to all move in concert against an enemy.

Statewide, the first round (I'm too tired to keep track if we're in Phase 1B part 2 or what) was to healthcare workers only, and it quickly became clear there was no plan for distributing to anyone else, because this was all being done in hospitals, by hospital staff.

Now they're working on opening this mega vaccine clinic thing, partnering with CVS and Walgreens, and having SOME health care providers offer it. But that's just started, I'd say, last week. It feels like almost no thought was put into long term care facilities other than to say "they should be right up there with health care workers".

California has an alarmingly overconfident and autocratic governor who is likely to face a recall in the coming months. The problem is even if Newsom/Getty does get replaced there are few credible politicians on the horizon who can handle the massive debt load, complex layers of bureaucracy, alarming levels of graft and extreme levels of economic hardship.

It's a serious situation, with the endless talk and inadequate action from Newsom/Getty making a lot of people very angry.

There's a lot to your comment. Could you be more specific about how Neswom is being autocratic? Is he overstepping the powers of his office? Is he not listening to Californians?

I'm not sure where the line between hypocrite and autocrat is, but it was a bad move to tell people to only congregate with their own households while indoor dining is shut down in most of the state, and then go have what was probably a $600 per person dinner in person and indoors with a lobbyist (the topic of their friendship is a whole 'nother discussion that doesn't really pertain to whether or not he's autocratic, but it does relate to why I'm not happy with him as a governor).

Just FYI, that county did not have indoor dining restrictions when he dined there, so he did not break the law.

Well that clears it up.

While I don't think there's any legal penalty for violators, at the time of the birthday party the California Department of Public Health prohibited gatherings of 3 or more households: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CDP...

Newsom also relaxed his original "science based" thresholds for shutting down dining, which helped keep Napa County restaurants and wineries (including the one which he still partially owns) open.

When asking people not to celebrate birthdays with their friends or to send their kids to school in person, it sets a bad example when you do those things. It also probably doesn't help your job effectiveness when you're forced to do 14 day quarantines multiple times due to nonessential COVID exposure (I think his kid's classmates have gotten it a few times)

California is a one party state, completely dominated by the Democrat party.

I'm a registered Democrat who was hoping for reforms FWIW. Newsom/Getty is facing stiff legal challenges from Republicans such as Kevin Kiley which I feel are very important to make things a little more democratic. His blog articulates examples of Newsom/Getty's autocratic approach

https://blog.electkevinkiley.com/its-all-fallen-apart-for-ne...

> Newsom/Getty

> Democrat party

You’re coming across kind of crazy with this stuff, maybe unintentionally.

I didn't read it that way. Also a lifelong registered Democrat who isn't happy with the way California is being run.

Newsom was brought up by the Getty family after his parents divorced. He is closely aligned with Getty interests.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/gavin-newsoms-keep...

Can you be more specific about why you think what I've said is 'kind of crazy'?

Conspiracy theorist, at a guess. You could just write Neswom and to not have that reaction. I honestly thought you were referring to the lieutenant governor because I didn't remember who that is until I looked it up. Then, I was just confused.

Not very clear on what you think the theory to 'conspire' might be here and who the participants are?

I have just stated political facts about California politics (where I have lived for 30 years). I have never voted Republican in my life (or tory in the UK where I come from).

I disagree with every bullet point in the in that link. Moreover it seems like the guy is just trying to sell a book. Worst, it doesn't even make the case for autocracy so it doesn't even support your premise.

California is also not a one party state. Please look at the results of the last election and see how many Republicans won office, and what the results of the initiatives were.

Kiley is a central valley Republican who is very much behind the recall effort. I'm sure you don't like any of those bullet points if you are a Newsom supporter. Kiley is in a high stakes legal battle with Newsom challenging his autocratic rule and has won subject to Newsom appeals.

'In California, Democrats held trifecta control of state government from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2011 to present. During all other years, California operated under divided government'.

https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_California_state_go...

Yes the Democratic party has dominant position now.

The recall just seems like guerilla warfare for no good purpose. We have elections. I don't believe Newsom's leadership is so damaging that he needs to be removed from office before his term is up. And I'm not going to believe it from the Republican side, which is a party that hasn't argued in good faith in the last 50 years, IMO

See my parent comment:

The problem is even if Newsom/Getty does get replaced there are few credible politicians on the horizon who can handle the massive debt load, complex layers of bureaucracy, alarming levels of graft and extreme levels of economic hardship.

When people say California is a one party state what they mean is the Democratic Party has a super majority along with the governor. Assuming most democrats agree on something nobody can really stop them.

Right. When I see one party state I think of the CCP. The better terminology would be the majority party, or the dominant party. I think there's a lot of heterogeneity within the Democratic party in California, especially at the local level, and are much less likely than Republicans to march in lockstep.

> California is a one party state, completely dominated by the Democrat party.

Only fairly recently had the competitiveness of the California Republican Party collapsed utterly, and entirely because they've slavishly followed the national party away from California interests.

> I'm a registered Democrat

Who nevertheless uses the deliberately incorrect “Democrat Party” invented for and consistently used in Republican propaganda?

> Newsom/Getty

Yeah, now if you just throw around “socialist" gratuitously, you’ll complete the image.

Looking at your history, your political posts are pretty consistently standard Republican attacks on Democratic positions and the Democratic Party, so I'm not surprised.

1 Trifectas in California

In California, Democrats held trifecta control of state government from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2011 to present. During all other years, California operated under divided government.

https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_California_state_go...

2 I have never vote Republican party in my life. I am a registered Democrat who has made a lot of effort to reform that party over the last 12 months.

3 Newsom/Getty is the exact opposite of 'Socialist'. you don't get any more 'elite' than dyslexic Gavin, who it is rumored the DNC will pair with Harris for the next presidential election

Bloomberg maintains an excellent dashboard that tracks vaccination in the US and worldwide ([1]). It shows that California is one of the slowest states with only 37% of received vaccine administered. Top five states are North Dacota (77%), West Virginia (74%), Oregon (61%), South Dacota (61%) and Texas (60%).

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

I don't know that percentage of received vaccine administered is quite the right metric: I tend to think doses administered per capita is the key number.

But whatever number you look at, California is a disgrace. We've fucked this colossally. The only states that are worse than we are are poor, rural, and low education.

> The only states that are worse than we are are poor, rural, and low education.

So are all of the top states, to be fair, excepting maybe Oregon (those are somewhat loose terms at a state level).

It's not really true that all of them are: Alaska and North Dakota are actually quite wealthy per capita due to petroleum. Connecticut is also one of the states handling the vaccination quite well, and it's quite urban. But a number of the states doing well with vaccinations are quite poor and rural, and that just makes it all the more damning that California is doing so terribly poorly.

As far as I can tell, it's not anything particularly to do with any demographic factor: other big states like New York and Texas are doing much better than California. States that are both deeply red and deeply blue are doing much better than California. California is just... failing. We're underperforming every state that might reasonably be a comparator.

As a Republican in Washington State, I have a respect for Oregon's Democrats - they work hard for their citizenry.

Hey mods, this is post naturally leads to politicized comments. Please consider killing it.

Can the government do anything right? Seriously. Can you give me examples of successful government programs?

  * The highway program
  * The national parks program
  * Army Corps of Engineers' projects
  * FEMA

?

USGS maps are also amazing, not sure really what project they came from but you can get a very good topo map of anywhere in the country. Really nice to have for planning hiking trips.

I'd add the NWS to that. I don't know of a better place to get weather information and forecasts than weather.gov. Perhaps it's just a lack of ads on the website compared to every other weather site.

Medicaid seems successful.

I see successful government projects in many countries. Unfortunately in the US we have this belief that government projects are destined to fail, which means we don’t invest in them, so they often fail... self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.

That’s not true! Blue states exist, and they invest in plenty of things. Those fail, but that doesn’t deter blue state voters.

If you look at why they fail, it can typically be followed back to interventions made by the right.

Sorry, no, that excuse is toxic because it provides cover for bad government that doesn’t work. We’re talking about states like California and New York that don’t have a meaningful “right.” California’s attempt at universal healthcare managed to self-destruct with Democrats having the Governorship as well as super-majorities in the state legislature. Every now and then these states will elect a moderate Republican just to get a reprieve from the repeated waves of failure of public services, but those failures can’t be blamed on “the right.”

People in blue states should be madder about the fact that their public services are bad. That just means that people get less than what they pay for, and people in need do without. If it cost Europeans as much money to build subways as it does New York or SF they probably wouldn’t do it! And even when it doesn’t like (like California HSR) and is merely 5-10x more expensive than it should be, that just means 1/5 or 1/10th as many people get the service.

People should be mad about the quality of public services in the states but "delivering universal health care" seems like a weirdly high bar to set.

It’s just the latest example of something European countries a lot less wealthy than California have managed to do that California can’t manage to do.

Right, but those are countries, and California is not. They control their borders, heavily restrict residency, and have their own central banks.

Europe has free movement of people throughout the Schengen Area and a common currency plus European Central Bank. It's not quite federalism but there is nothing here to disqualify California from providing universal healthcare.

Citizens of members states can, for instance, travel through Germany and remain there indefinitely so long as they're financially independent or actively looking for work, but they are not automatically residents of Germany. The two situations, EU member states and California compared to its peer states, are obviously not comparable.

There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state.

(I oppose single-payer health care, for whatever that's worth to you. I just think the bar Rayiner set for this discussion is silly.)

> There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state.

How do you figure? This is exactly how Canada's single payer system came about: province-by-province. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal.

Is there a state in Canada that doesn't provide single-payer health care? Because every state surrounding California would not be.

Not now, but between 1947 and 1961 there absolutely was. That’s the point: it didn’t happen from the top-down at the Federal level, it happened province-by-province and there was a period of time when it was patchwork. It was fine for the Canadians, and it can be fine for Americans as well.

Also, if I’m understanding your argument correctly, it’s that States can’t do this because borders are open, but there’s nothing stopping a State from applying its public insurance only for established residents of the State. This is how State university systems operate; you don’t get in-state tuition at UC Berkeley unless you can establish residence. In theory, someone at the borders could move across State lines in order to do that, but that’s probably a rounding error in the UC budget.

I’m curious why you think Canada couldn’t provide single payer health care. (For the record, I support a Canadian style system.)

The biggest challenge I see is that people might rush to California to claim the benefits. It’s not clear that’s a real problem (and it’s not the problem Vermont and California actually ran aground on).

The Supreme Court’s precedent in this area is a shambles. But if California offered state-run universal insurance, I bet the Supreme Court would approve measures to keep people from moving to California after they got sick.

Adverse selection of people claiming residency benefits isn't the only issue I cited there, right? There are things countries can do to finance universal health care that states can't do.

California would, in practice, need a variety of permissions from the feds to do approximately single-payer, which still wouldn't be actually single payer. Both the ACA and Medicaid would be major federal issues (in principal, it could opt out of Medicaid, but that would lose a lot of federal health care funding California is being taxed for). And it would still have the interface-to-other-systems problems single-payer is designed to avoid, because Medicare and VA would still exist and require coordination of benefits.

No European country would have similar problems, because they are independent nations.

Then maybe the left shouldn’t be clamoring for it?

This is a vicious circle. The less trust, the less effective government can achieve society's goal.

Just look at all the civil servants like nurses and firemen who still refuse the jab.

There is a vast difference between "Can the government do anything right?" and "Can the Trump administration do anything right?"

The Federal government can be an amazing force for help in times of crisis when run by competent people. As we have seen, though, when run by actively malicious people, it can grind to a halt.

The current Covid vaccine situation is due to a bunch of idiotic Federal decisions made starting 12 months ago that continue through to the present day--including things like "Not paying money to vaccine companies in advance to help them ramp up faster".

The U.S. government was purposefully designed to be inefficient. Checks and balances, multiple branches of government, rotating people out every so often, pesky votes and confirmations to decide anything. “Getting things done” was never the goal. The fact that everyone wants the government to be the one to get things done, and then acts surprised and frustrated when it can’t just shows...I don’t know, that we didn’t pay attention in school when the basics of the constitution were taught?

I mean, can you imagine if Trump (or whichever president you hate) had been in charge of some well oiled “gets things done” government for the last 4 years? The founders knew exactly what they were doing.

Can you give me an example where a system that isn't a government did a better job than a government could do, while maintaining a similar scale and level of inclusion?

It's easy to be successful when you reduce your goals from something like "vaccinate all long-term care residents in the state" to "vaccinate all the people who we have accepted into our long-term care facility which has a strict capacity limit and we turn away people when it's full or they don't pay us enough"

Also businesses and NGOs fail all the time. Businesses go bankrupt. NGOs continue funneling money into unproven or disproven programs. The world is complicated, and only more so when lots of people are involved.

There's always one person with this comment. From a USA perspective, social security, the space program, the all powerful military machine, operation warp speed, the UFO cover-up. FDA, EPA, FEC. The FTC seems pretty successful if you're a wall street trader. In California , medi-cal covers 1/3 of the population. Firefighters. Police... Kind of iffy here.

Social Security works because the federal government just needs to print checks. Well some contractor prints the checks. But will the government be responsible enough to fund social security sustainably into the future?

The US Space program is falling apart with NASA's SLS rocket failing basic tests and costing $20B. Oh and James Webb being delayed years and costing $10B (if it even works). The only bright light in American space programs is SpaceX and JPL.

The $750B a year military machine is a huge waste of money which deserves a post on itself. Here's a terrible waste from Biden's Defense Secretary nominee https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-austin-us-trained-sy... $500M for 4-5 actual fighters.

I'm ok paying police and firefighters at the local level. The government bureaucracy gets worse and worse the further you get away from local government.

I can go on.

Military: We haven't been invaded yet. And it employs lots of people. And it brings pork to lots of districts. We installed two puppet regimes on the other side of the planet! How is that not success?

Space: every single robot/vehicle/probe that does science across the solar system and beyond. Every single NRO satellite the size of Hubble pointed at our enemies.

I'm actually serious about social security. How does that not work? Between it and medicare that makes most of the federal budget, and it keeps people healthy and fed. Repeating a libertarian trope does not make it so.

Also I’ve heard the SEC and the like has enormously reduced fraudulent/swindling over the last century.

Here’s an argument for successful program: “The CARES superdole was a huge success”

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-...

Here are a few examples.

Hoover Dam

Panama Canal

Tennessee Valley Authority

NASA's Apollo Program

The Manhattan Project

Energy Star

National Malaria Eradication Program

Boll Weevil Eradication Program

Smallpox eradication

Safe Drinking Water Act and many other USDA, FDA, and EPA programs that regulate food, air, and water quality.

Kinda proves the point of folks who say none of this is about saving lives.

What is it about?

Getting rid of Republicans: most in long-term care are.

It's not clear that it's really about anything. Nearly everyone in charge seems to just be going through the motions, filling their assigned role, without stepping back to think about what the goals are or how they can best be achieved. CDPH says that they authorized these clinics to begin setting up on December 28, which means with the standard 2 week lead time they could open on January 11 - the obvious question of why there should be a 2 week lead time, why vaccinations can't begin the very next day, does not appear to have been acknowledged or addressed.

Or...this is hard? And the long majority of long term care facilities were just turned on for vaccines? And doing consent and paperwork and injections with the elderly is slow? And there has been a huge reporting lag, because the priority is giving shots?

This doesn’t feed a conspiracy theory because it’s evidence. It feeds a conspiracy because it’s information and a conspiracy theory treats all information as proof it’s true.

They've had a year to prepare.

In 1947, NYC was capable of vaccinating 6,350,000 people in the span of 3 weeks for a smallpox outbreak. [0] How does a person reconcile this information with the progress we've made so far with covid-19 vaccinations?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_ou...

What point exactly?

One state's poor performance in handling vaccine distribution proves [none of the vaccination efforts are] about saving lives?

Why don't you say exactly what you are trying to imply.

I heard it was so bill gates could install 5G in my brain?

Maybe you'll change your tune when everyone who wants to get a vaccine will have one by the time 2021 is over.

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