001all right so i think we're gonna just roll right into the vaccinations well not literally roll into the back roll into the discussion regarding explanations i hope we don't roll into them ben because that is not an approved method of delivery and we don't want to waste anything ever ever or ever yeah exactly clear well maybe you could start um well maybe we can all start by thanking you first off for all the advocacy on bringing doses back into the community centers thank you um i know how hard you and all of the other local directors of board of health worked to make this happen so thank you um and with that maybe you can answer a few questions about how that is how that's going to happen like how where do people go what's
002their first what's the first thing they would do if they're looking to make an appointment yeah sure so um the massachusetts website uh i think it's now vaxfinder.mas.gov and that's the state website that'll have available appointments around and you can search by region you can search by zip code um i believe you can search um let me actually click on it right now so we're all being like informed and here you can see like the first one that comes up is boston and you can see what type of site they are if they have appointments listed or if they're full um for us right now if i type in 0102 we come up as as of right now it still says the amherst regional high school and all of our appointments are full because we
003haven't posted our new public clinics yet um but as of monday we will be transitioning back to clinics here at the bang center we are able to do 250 to 500 people a day we're going to be having clinics more frequently uh instead of like the two big clinics that we are having at the high school so we'll be able to have clinics about four or five days a week here so in anywhere from doing a thousand to uh 1250 vaccines a week here at the high at the bank center thanks and now um correct me if i'm wrong this is in coordination with northampton yeah that's exactly correct so northampton and us here in amherst the whole health department's partnered up for a regional effort northampton is the primary site we are the satellite
004site off of them um but we are really appreciative to be able to make this go forward and is this just for hampshire county residents or is it open to anyone who falls under the phasing guidelines yeah that's another great question so as of march 1st in order for local health departments to continue these are open sites all sites will be open in general sites for anyone in massachusetts um a general question um related to this um about how do you happen to know about how far the state is through the 65 plus and people with two oh my good that's a great question no idea i haven't been told that information i'm sure they must have a sense but i know that we just started it at least it feels that way yeah so
005still a lot to learn okay i'm sure when they have a sense sorry to cut you off krista i'm sure when they have a sense it'll be in the weekly vaccine report that they publish on the state site okay and i guess knowing the approximate percent of people they are through would require having a very good estimate of how many people exist in this pool and i think last time we talked that was something that was difficult to identify well i know i'm not sure of those numbers yeah um i know that they've been working that you know the census having have that be done and complete would be really helpful as well uh and i think they're still working on that okay great also to kind of take some of the pressure off of
006the local uh boards of health you really don't have much control over the state website uh you have no control over it no control and i echo um i think all of us in this moment are are having a challenging time on all sides with the technology that's out there to sign up and get people registered there are some challenges and some barriers um that i i know that they're working on in the state level uh they do have the two one one call line available for individuals that are over 65 and don't have access to internet to help people register but other than that they're really trying to align people with those natural base supports family members friends neighbors to help people register for appointments so um just as a follow-up for that for
007those people that have myself uh included trying to get my husband an appointment last last week like i forget how many other people um that you don't there's nothing that you can do on your end to facilitate the website so calling the local board of health is not going to help facilitate getting an appointment correct correct uh local boards of health and health departments because of health equity we have to defer people back were instructed to defer people back to those natural base supports to help them sign up and register and i think the next thing i wanted to ask because i know there's been some news recently about trials for younger individuals you have any information that you can share about that uh the no i wish i did we i've been so focused
008so focused on our vaccine clinics this week um by the end of saturday we'll have done over 1500 doses just this week alone um and by the end of this week we'll have done a total of over four 4 4 400 vaccines since we started so i wish i had more time to listen to some really good podcasts and get caught up on that stuff but i'm going to be honest gene that that i don't have that information i know that they have started some trials in adolescence not not very young children but some adolescents have started trials so i'll be interested to see how that progresses um me too now we the first time we talked about vaccines i think we were talking about 86 000 doses uh federally in coming into the state
009but that has increased correct yeah the last count that i heard it was about 120 but i think last week after there were those delays and shipments when we got when massachusetts i shouldn't say we but massachusetts as a whole had an influx of over 150 000 vaccines last week which is great that i mean more is better and the word that we hear is that that moderna and pfizer are committed to expediting their process so they will be able to roll out more vaccines quicker and in higher volumes speed up and improve production that's what i meant to say on that is since you you were getting the moderna vaccine sent is it still the same with partnership with northampton is it still the majorna that's a great question krista so we will be
010primarily obtaining the pfizer vaccine for the state to continue our programs we are hoping to continue a small amount of moderna vaccine clinics but those will be for second dose participants okay well i'm glad i asked so switching sounds like you're you'll be switching to pfizer then um okay yeah another question on that is and you might not know this because i know your your focus is on your own local work but is umass still providing a vaccine clinic at this time yep so umass will be continuing to be a vaccine site um i'm not sure if they will be continuing with moderna or pfizer vaccine but they will be continuing as a site for hampshire county as well so the three larger sites in hampshire county are uh northampton here at the amherst health
011department and then umass campus at the campus center and as far as you know this is going the regional the community centers for vaccine distribution should continue until for the foreseeable future as far as you right now it could change yeah until it changes right so the uh with us being designated as sites right now the directive that we begin given is that we will be continuing through phase three um for local health departments that are participating in terms of community health centers like the john muizante center or that's under the hilltown community health center uh they are also doing vaccines as well um i'm not sure as an organization they're primarily doing those out of their larger huntington clinic the john museum t center is obviously a smaller clinic here but i know that
012we've been having some preliminary discussions about how we can support their efforts as well here in the amherst community i don't have any more questions about vaccines for right now ben or krista i'm not sure if you do yeah i just have the the million-dollar question every time i'm just gonna sorry emma but i'm gonna keep asking that's all right i like it it makes me feel popular the so how far out approximately i know you can't say definitively and i know that things can change but but if we were to estimate about how far out are the the school staffs yeah i think that we've been seeing the phases come through quicker with those next stages i'm really really hopeful with the ramping up of the production let's see i'm getting my words right
013with the pfizer and moderna and then also hopefully that johnson and johnson coming on board very quickly i know that's going through the fda for eua very soon i think in the next few days so i remain really hopeful that within the next two or three weeks but that's me speaking um just on a kind of a gut feeling by how we've been seeing things progress uh how quickly we went from the start of phase two to those 65 and over um i am just really hopeful that it's gonna keep going like that for the rest of us and so for the record the optimistic view i just wanna we are we are the optimistic group um emma that third step in the second phase that's a fairly large group correct it is a large
014group so i think that step three will take quite a bit of time because it is such a diverse employment demographic with grocery transit teachers dpw and health inspectors so many others that i can't think of at this very moment but well like i said i'm i'm really hopeful with the increasing of the production the onboarding of the johnson johnson vaccine that hopefully things will move quicker than the pace of a turtle that i know i've been feeling things some things are going um i think i would be remiss if i didn't also give a shout out to our local state legislators who have been advocating quite a bit for us here in western massachusetts so for me and amherst that would be rep dom and senator comerford and they really have been amazing yeah
015they're terrific we're really lucky to have them so um some of the other issues i think that we wanted to talk about were contact tracing as well as um for lack of a better way of putting it when to stay home when you are not feeling well um why don't we start with that one first because that that is kind of a a topic that can be difficult to to to narrow down we know when you should stay home when you've had a fever for um 24 hours you know vomiting diarrhea all of that but when we're now that we're in a pandemic what are the recommendations for when someone whether you're an adult working or a child attending school when should when should um you stay home so let's see so um i'm trying
016to read so is it the things that i know with the season that we're in is trying to differentiate if is it covet 19 or the flu really things that they want you to do is if you have a fever if you're coughing having trouble breathing persistent pain or pressure on your chest then certainly those last few things are medical emergencies so you want to contact your physician or go to a hospital but things that they really want you to watch for covet would be if you have a fever and that would be a fever of 100 over a persistent cough extreme fatigue or muscle or body aches a sore throat or congestion those you can call your provider or an urgent care center so a lot of our providers are better now with the
017telehealth i think everyone like this is more comfortable with that so under their guidance you could see what their recommendations would be if you to get a test to quarantine at home until they could get a test or if they could if they had a sore throat or can just some congestion that was in alignment with their normal symptoms for spring i know i tend to get seasonal allergies in the spring as all the great pollens start so thinking about that and those regular conditions that some of us experience and really thinking taking that into consideration so i would say with the partnership of your medical providers um using their critical skills for medical assessments that's when you would want to stay home so to be fair to say when in doubt stay out something
018wrong well i think um that if people are i like to think that all of us are adults and professionals in our work and we would have the capacity and the ability to assess our own health and if you are feeling ill that you can't participate in work because you have a fever or some other new acute condition happening then you would work with your medical providers with that and not attend work so i guess next we'd kind of like to get a sense of if there have been any changes to the protocols around contact tracing um this is um the pandemic we've we've realized is has a lot of information that that comes very rapidly so are there any changes that you have seen in the last few weeks around contact tracing yeah so
019in the last couple weeks i know that the recommendations for uh quarantining after an exposure if you're vaccinated within that window of where they say you're you're fully immunized beyond the two weeks and within that 90-day period that you would not need to quarantine for an exposure other than that i i have not heard of any other changes gene all right this might be a bit i think this is a bad question um and we asked this a while ago um i remember we're that we're the hopeful group so i've been hopeful and an optimist since october i think and asking about return to in person and so um as we're looking to put more get more students and more staff into buildings does the district have a sen more of a sense of available
020empty spaces where staff can socially distance and have lunch because as we know we it makes no sense to have people using the spaces that they did in the past which are typically interior rooms with no windows and poor ventilations and fairly small so i think what we had asked for was a list of um available rooms by building and i haven't seen that yet but i know it's probably going to change because we're looking at moving more staff and students into buildings so i don't know if you can yeah i can actually as of today i can actually speak intelligently about this finally so what the important part is it so it's building by building is how it's being assessed rather than throughout the whole district which so building administrators have like identified specific
021rooms and i i think we can we can get them all to to give us as the jlmsc the exact locations of those rooms offhand i want to tell you the exact room number in crocker because it was it was actually set up today i did a walk-through over there today but um yeah so it's a building-by-building situation and so far the guidance that we're given in trying not to micromanage it necessarily but also trying to to maintain a safety standard is that that we are making sure that they are spaces where no more than two staff members will be in there at a time and that they will be greater than six feet apart with open windows so it's it's a building by building and i'd like to put the whole document together at
022some point early next week so i'll be bothering building administrators one by one starting with crocker following your follow up for that krista i kind of i have it's uh another really old thing that um now that we're thinking about more bodies and more buildings um back before the winter holiday we were having conversations that we would return to often about ventilation for time-out spaces and um it's been a long time since we've asked but um i last we knew the status of it was that there was um some work that needed to be done to find a viable way to put some ventilation into those spaces and we're we're curious if you have an update for us on how that's going and like i i acknowledge it's been a while since we've asked so
023it might be buried in your brain a little bit right right the uh so the most what i can recall the quickest i'll say is um without looking anything up is the the time-out spaces at wildwood have been completed in terms of the the ventilation we'd added the uh supplemental air purification systems to those rooms and they were we were in the process of doing that at fort river when we kind of shifted gears now so we're focusing back on crocker now and then we'll circle back around to fort river because of because of the prior we're prioritizing where students will actually be so is what whatever you developed for wildwood and fort river i know those buildings are really similar do you have i'm assuming that you have some ideas on how to move
024forward at crocker now from that process how how do you anticipate that going at crocker yeah so it's got to be slightly less tricky i suppose so the original systems that we had which were in ceiling mounted it's more possible i'll say that's the safest way to answer that that that those can be installed there without a whole bunch of like re-engineering or anything yeah it's it's one of those i don't want to want to say that we're that it's definitely going to be easier it looks like it's a lot easier to handle there and also i'm sorry go ahead oh sorry ben do you have a timeline for completion no the the other thing i was going to add on is at crocker the difference is that those rooms are direct vented as is
025so this would be in addition to that so but yeah and that that's actually the one part where it sort of does get tricky is doing the math on not kind of over ventilating the the room if that makes sense right we don't want to create a negative complete negative pressure room so so it's 428 i don't have any anything else krista do you have anything else just a question one just one last question about long-term planning um and we talked about available lunch spaces we're also curious if you have an update on numbers of subs and buildings or how that discussion is going or as we're you know thinking about people in buildings pretty soon what is what is the sub situation looking like right i i don't have any new information to add
026to that just the uh i think it's been probably a month now right since we talked about that that there are subs assigned i don't have exact numbers but we can we can i don't want to say press but we can request that information the uh be renewed i guess if anything by monday i think it's fair to get that by the end of the day monday and would it also be fair to say that the focus at the at least at the elementary level is on wildwood and um crocker farm and amherst pelham is its own district but as far as the amherst public schools the focus on uh everything is on wildwood and crocker farm is that correct yeah and and in order the order of priority it's crocker and then wildwood but
027yes those are those are two main focal points right now all right emma once again thank you for everything that you're doing please pass on also our thanks to the northampton director of public health because i know you do a lot of work collaboratively and it's much appreciated thank you so much gene i mean really we wouldn't be here with with everyone coming together at this time uh i really do appreciate meredith o'leary she's the director for the northampton but also our partnership with our local fire department here in amherst um has really been helpful they're they're with us every day for our clinics and then also my public health nurse jen brown rit department our facilities department here for the town the school too i'm looking right at ben and all of our partners
028that we've had with the school and and our countless volunteers that are coming every day um it's just a really special moment to be in all this together it's really kind of like turning a new leaf the new chapter so it it's good work perfect all right and so with that um have a great weekend everyone thanks so much thanks you too bye enjoy stay so i safe linger for three minutes to see if there's any comments worth answering not worth answering any comments that need answering i should say you