Watch the Regents' Health Services Committee Meeting of Dec. 15, 2021

As blog readers will know, the Regents' Health Services Committee met yesterday via Zoom. In fact, yesterday, we posted a brief excerpt from the presentation by UC Health VP Carrie Byington on the Omicron/COVID-19 situation. We repost that excerpt below - in case you missed it - along with the recording of the entire meeting. (The full Byington presentation begins around minute 13.10.)

The meeting began with public comments dealing with labor issues at Children's Hospital-Oakland and about in-home care outsourcing. Both UC prez Drake and VP Byington dealt with the current uncertainty surround the Omicron variant. As we noted, Byington indicated that it might well be the case that despite vaccines, everyone will eventually get Omicron due to it contagiousness. There was also concern that the use of testing for the coronavirus meant that medical staff were quarantining, thus adding to labor shortage problems. 

The topic then turned to medical education in California and a program aimed at increasing diversity of physicians. There was also discussion of the opiod problem and a suggestion that early reporting of developing problems of that type would be useful.

We preserve recording of Regents meetings indefinitely since the Regents "archive" them for only one year - for reasons unknown. 

You can find a link to the entire meeting at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-health-services-committee-12-15-21.

As noted above, we again post the Byington every-one-may-get-it-despite-vaccination excerpt below:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQzfK6Q_ElA.