Daily Republic: Sunday, January 23, 2022

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The Vallejo Symphony announces its 2022 season B1

49ers win another playoff thriller, sink Packers B6

SUNDAY  |  January 23, 2022  |  $1.50

DAILYREPUBLIC.COM  |  Well said. Well read.

‘Lethal’ US military aid arriving in Ukraine Tribune Content Agency U.S. military aid to help Ukraine defend against a possible invasion by Russia began arriving on Friday night, according to the American Embassy in Kyiv. The embassy, in a Twitter post, said the material “includes close to 200,000 pounds of lethal aid, including ammunition for the front line defenders of Ukraine.” “The shipment – and $2.7 billion USD since 2014 – demonstrates U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine bolster its defenses in the face of growing Russian aggression,” the embassy said in another tweet. Photos with the tweets showed large green containers being unloaded at an airport. The embassy did not elaborate, or indicate what else was included, but said it was a first shipment of “assistance recently directed by” President Joe Biden. The announcement was made at the end of an anxious week in which an assault on Ukraine by Russia seemed more likely. A meeting in Geneva led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov didn’t yield an agreement, though both sides agreed to continue talks. “If Russia wants to begin to convince the world that it has no aggressive intent toward Ukraine, a very good place to start would be deescalating,” Blinken said Friday at the end of a three-day European trip. Russia has assembled a large armed force on its border with Ukraine and sent troops and armor to Belarus, to Ukraine’s north, for joint military drills scheduled to begin Feb. 10. Putin has demanded security guarantees that would prevent Ukraine from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and require the alliance to roll back its forces to positions they held in 1997, before Central and Eastern European nations joined NATO. The U.S. and its NATO allies have rejected those demands.

Susan Hiland/Daily Republic

Behnaaz Ferozepurwalla administers a Covid-19 nasal swab test to daughter Jasmine Ferozepurwalla, 5, at the

Vacaville School District’s free Covid testing center in Vacaville, Saturday.

Free Covid testing by the Vacaville School District brings out hundreds Susan Hiland

SHILAND@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

VACAVILLE — The Covid-19 test strips were about the size of a small hand. On one end was the cotton swab that was inserted into the nasal cavity. The entire thing looks something like a large pregnancy test. Mena Bubakar, Covid test collector for BayPLS, a mobile testing company for the Bay Area, places a solution over the end of the cotton swab to create a reaction to test for Covid. One line means negative and two lines means positive. The test strips are marked by time and placed on a table. She inputs them after more than a few minutes of waiting. A lot of the tests Saturday have two lines, meaning people who came into the Vacaville School District Covid testing center have Covid-19. “The test are showing more positives this month than in September,” Bubakar said. “On an average day we would have like 10 positives. This surge is a lot more.” A text message with the results

will go out in 15 minutes to those who were just in for the test. For those who were positive, it’s a quarantine period of five to 10 days. Behnaaz Ferozepurwalla, aka Mrs. Fero, is a teacher at Vacaville High School. She is not sick nor is her daughter, Jasmine, 5, or her husband Ashkan, but because of the surge, the family has decided to be proactive and test themselves on a regular basis. “None of us has gotten sick,” she said. “But I am really excited that my place of work is offering these free tests because it is hard to find tests right now.” With the surge from the omicron variant, more people want to be tested and it is causing a shortage of tests nationwide. “This is precautionary,” the Vacaville High teacher said. “A lot of teachers at our daughter’s kids center are out with this,” her husband Ashkan said. “It’s like we go to pick her up and every day is a new teacher.” He travels a lot for his work and because of that decided they all

should test regularly. Thankfully, not one of them has gotten ill. “We got our shots, we got the boosters,” he said. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” The testing Saturday is part of an ongoing opportunity provided by the school district for staff and teachers. About 288 people signed up to get the Covid test Saturday. Ed Santopadre has been associate superintendent of Educational Services for the past five years. he said these past three school years were nothing like he expected. “This has caused a lot of adjustments in how we do things,” he said of the pandemic. The surge of cases since Christmas break has caused the school to offer more testing. “We felt the need to do more testing,” Santopadre said. “After we did some popup testing for staff and got a really good turnout, we thought we could do more.” So they provided first the school staff and students with

Supervisors to consider actions to stem sea rise Testing, case adjustment leaves Todd R. Hansen

THANSEN@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

FAIRFIELD — A recent Caltrans report warns that nearly all of Highway 37 could be underwater by 2040 due in large part to rising sea levels. Solano County supervisors will hear a presentation Tuesday on the subject and consider a resolution in support of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s “Bay Adapt: Regional Strategy for a Rising Bay.” The board meets at 9 a.m. in the first-floor chamber of the government center, 675 Texas St. in Fairfield. A closed session follows the public meeting. Labor negotiations and fairgrounds property negotiations are listed as closed session items. An update on election planning is also scheduled. “The Bay Area is one of the most culturally and geographically diverse places in the country. The risks of sea level rise, and resources necessary to address them, are unequal across the Bay Area. This is why all nine actions in the Joint Platform emphasize achieving equitable outcomes for the region. We also know our region’s wetlands are essential to our well-being – and also first at risk,” the executive summary of Bay Adapt states. “We cannot solve these challenges alone. Bay Adapt has been working with See Supes, Page A10

Solano with ‘funky’ Friday totals Todd R. Hansen

THANSEN@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

FAIRFIELD — Requirements for some individuals to show multiple negative tests before returning to work or school likely created more than 1,000 positive cases that were duplicated. The best explanation, Dr. Bela Matyas said, is that the individuals likely went to one location for one test, and then a different location for the second, and in doing so, were counted as two cases rather than as one case with multiple tests for the same initial positive result. “So we have some funky numbers . . . today,” Matyas, the county public health officer, said Friday in a phone interview.

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When the duplications were removed, it meant only 42 new cases to be added to the case total, now 64,237. A third pediatric death was reported: a child between 5 and 11 who had become ill in December, developed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and died earlier this month. Matyas said the child may not have been eli-

gible to be vaccinated before being infected with the coronavirus. It is the second child, the other a teenager, who died of MIC-C after having Covid19. The first pediatric case was an infant not yet 1 year old. It takes the total number of Covid-related deaths in the county to 370. The number of Solano County residents hospitalized with Covid-19 was

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reported Friday at 163, up from 154 Wednesday, but the number of patients in the intensive care units dropped from 31 to 30, the county reported. The 10-day daily case average was reported at 477.2. The recalculation of the cases also means that tracking case increases in the cities and the county See Testing, Page A10

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