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very shallow current in the river – so they were more active. I take that as a good thing – that they were already able to swim and navigate.”

The project began after the Golden State Salmon Association and Nor-Cal Guides and Sportsmen’s Association proposed the idea to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA fisheries in the spring of 2021.

The project began with a spawning phase, after which biologists removed the dead eggs from the live ones to prevent fungus from suffocating the good eggs. The hatchlings were nurtured at the hatchery then released into the upper river, where high waters made that task more difficult, but was helpful for the fish.

“This project will allow us to study the potential of generating additional adult returns to spawn naturally in the Sacramento River by releasing fry,” Paul Souza, regional director for the service’s California Great Basin Region, said in the statement. “We’re excited to provide these additional salmon to increase recreational opportunities for fishermen and women here in California.”

A key question researchers hope to answer is how many of these small salmon survive to adulthood and where they will return as adults. If they do, it will benefit the species as well as the recreational anglers.

“The fisherman out there were very interested in what we were doing, so it is a great opportunity to communicate with the public. Everyone was so accommodating of sharing the boat ramp with the hatchery vehicles and release pipes,” Gaylean said.

Board

From Page One

ondary students, teachers and staff about priorities in midApril 2021. They received 1,635 responses from families, 1,401 responses from students and 256 responses from staff. They also discussed planning with administrators and met April 30 with bargaining units representing teachers and those who are not teachers.

The district surveyed educational partners in early September to get public input specific to the development of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund plan for the use of pandemic funds.

The survey included students; families, including families that speak languages other than English; school and district administrators, including Special Education administrators; and teachers, principals, school leaders, other educators and school staff to find out their priorities for actions and services and their ideas about what would most benefit students in the district.

A total of 1,574 educational partners participated in that survey.

The district reviewed the draft priority and budget elements of the plan Sept. 24 with the Superintendent’s Parent Advisory Group to get its feedback. The district consulted with the local bargaining units Oct. 5.

The funding plan focuses on student and staff health and safety, instruction and mental health, according to the staff report.

The district is providing schools with masks, cleaning supplies and other Covid-prevention needs as planned. High-efficiency filters have been installed to improve HVAC systems, and the filters are changed regularly.

Children in the district’s elementary schools receive supplemental instruction during the school day, but the district is still working to hire some additional instructional assistants and services are often affected because of the need to use intervention specialists to teach in classrooms when no substitutes are available, according to a staff report.

Preliminary assessment data indicate this additional instruction has been successful, according to the staff report.

Teachers have begun to offer supplemental tutoring after school and the district continues to plan summer programs.

Laptops and carts were purchased and distributed as planned, with some delays due to what’s described in the staff report as supply chain challenges. The district is providing mental health services at schools and has filled a social worker position that was open for a few months in the fall.

Financial resources are being used in alignment with required plans and the Local Control Accountability Plan, according to the staff report.

The district is using assessments to identify unfinished learning, and teachers are providing additional instruction to help students close gaps.

The district has looked closely at the needs of English learners and is providing them with additional support, according to the staff report. Counselors have helped high school students develop credit recovery plans as needed.

Schools have masks and Covid-prevention supplies and Covid case data show the district’s efforts in implementing California Department of Public Health guidance to minimize the impact of Covid on school operations have been successful., according to the staff report.

The district’s social workers are providing socio-emotional support. Student support specialists and others provide check in/check out support for students who are struggling with motivation and work completion. The district has developed ethnic studies and Adulting 101 (financial literacy) courses to implement next year as planned.

Funds for the accountability plan total $5.3 million for the Travis district, of which $2.6 million has been spent, according to the staff report.

The meeting begins at 6 p.m. at the Travis Education Center 2775 De Ronde Drive in Fairfield. The full agenda and attendance protocols are available at www.travisusd.org.

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The office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that a diplomatic solution was more likely than war.

“An honest assessment of the situation suggests that the chance of finding a diplomatic solution for de-escalation is still substantially higher than the threat of further escalation,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said in a statement.

The new U.S. intelligence assessments came as the Biden administration was also warning that Moscow was considering filming a fake attack against Russian territory or Russian-speaking people by Ukrainian forces as a pretext to invade its neighbor - a claim the Kremlin has strenuously denied.

Seven people familiar with the assessments said Putin has 70 percent of the combat power he needs for an assault that – under the most extreme scenario – could quickly take out the capital, Kyiv, and remove Zelensky, Ukraine’s democratically elected president. Such an invasion, they said, could trigger a refugee crisis in Europe as up to 5 million people flee.

As of Friday, 83 Russian battalion tactical groups, with about 750 troops each, were arrayed for a possible assault. That is up from 60 two weeks ago.

The White House has said the United States does not have information that Putin has made a decision to invade. But satellite imagery and other intelligence indicate he has amassed more than 100,000 troops and equipment on the border with Ukraine - one Western security official put the number at 130,000 - potentially positioning for what could become the largest military land offensive in Europe since World War II.

“Our worry would be that you don’t park battle groups ... on the border of another country twice and do nothing,” one European official said, referring to an earlier buildup last year. “I think that’s the real fear that I have. [Putin’s] now put them all out there. If he does nothing again ... what does that say to the wider international community about the might of Russia?”

The European official and others familiar with the assessments spoke on the condition of anonymity is discussing intelligence matters.

The Conflict Intelligence Team, a Russian analytical team that uses open-source data to track Russian military movements, reported Sunday that some Russian forces had moved from a base in Yelnya, in the Smolensk region of southern Russia, closer to the Ukrainian border.

According to CIT, a “massive” Russian base at Yelnya was nearly empty, in what it described as a “dangerous” development. CIT said this suggested that “one scenario of a Russian attack is a deep thrust south towards Chernihiv and possibly Kyiv.”

Chernihiv is a city in northern Ukraine close to the Belarusian border, less than 90 miles north of Kyiv. The group said that transfers of Russian troops to the regions of Crimea, Rostov and Kursk in southern Russia were also worrying.

As the United States moved to strengthen NATO defenses in Eastern Europe, the head of the Belarusian Security Council, Alexander Volfovich, said there would be “very large” military maneuvers with Russian forces in southern Belarus in coming days, in response to tensions between NATO and Russia over Ukraine. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been playing a key role in Russia’s saber-rattling against Ukraine.

U.S. officials are concerned that the massive Russia-Belarus military exercise, set to begin Thursday, could be used as part of a multipronged invasion of Ukraine. The exercise has seen Russian troops and equipment travel more than 6,000 miles to Belarus, and the deployment of advanced missile systems, fighter planes and bombers.

U.S.-based company Maxar Technologies on Sunday published satellite images from Friday showing deployments of Russian forces in Belarus.

Moscow has denied that it intends to invade Ukraine but has made clear it considers the presence of Western troops and weapons in the former Soviet sphere an unacceptable security threat. Putin has accused the United States and its European allies of ignoring his key demands to bar Ukraine from joining NATO, rule out putting offensive strike weapons on Russia’s borders and roll back NATO’s weaponry and force posture to its 1997 boundaries.

Russia also has attempted to paint Ukraine as the aggressor in the crisis, warning that a NATObacked Kyiv could try to take back Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow in 2014. Meanwhile, some Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, have taken issue with Washington’s description of Russian deployments and the likelihood of an “imminent” attack, fearing it will cause panic and hurt Ukraine’s economy.

Volfovich accused Ukraine of threatening Belarus in comments reported by the BelTA state news agency Sunday. “We did not consider the southern direction as a threat to the country’s security before, but today, based on the assessment of the military-political strategic situation, we are forced to consider the southern direction as well,” he said.

Volfovich’s comments came after 2,000 U.S. troops arrived in Poland and Germany on Sunday to bolster European security.

Lukashenko, Russia’s closest ally, echoed Russian claims throughout the crisis that the threat of war comes not from Russia but from Ukraine and NATO. Still, he boasted that Ukraine could not afford to risk a war with Russian and Belarusian forces because “such a war would last a maximum three or four days.” He added that NATO was also afraid of a military confrontation with Russia and Belarus.

Covid

From Page One

not abandon completely, many of their protocols.

“We’re beginning to see the end of governmental control of people’s lives. Those will probably over the next month or so begin to diminish,” Morrow said. That doesn’t mean people won’t be asked, or expected, to maintain some protections like wearing masks; it just may rarely be required.

Part of that process has already begun locally: San Francisco revoked its indoor mask mandate for certain groups last Tuesday, and on Friday, Contra Costa County said it would no longer require proof of vaccination for places like restaurants and gyms.

California’s indoor mask mandate could be retired as soon as Feb. 15, and several Bay Area counties have said they don’t intend to extend local requirements once the state order is lifted.

Specific mandates aside, many health officers said they hope that as Covid becomes endemic, they can establish rules for living with it that are predictable and relatively easy to follow.

“We’re in a better place to start thinking about what the new normal might be, without necessarily emergency measures,” said Dr. Nicholas Moss, the Alameda County health officer. He said he expects Covid protocols to continue to evolve in the coming months and even years, “but I hope it’s not in a way that has that whiplash effect. We get a lot of curveballs with Covid, but I’m hopeful we can design things now that are more consistent.”

Indeed, perhaps the simplest definition of endemic is a steady state: a disease occurring in some predictable, stable pattern. But stability does not necessarily mean safety, and it does not mean the disease won’t require significant, community-wide efforts to control.

For instance, influenza is endemic, as are several coronaviruses that cause the common cold, and many other respiratory illnesses. Then again, so are malaria and tuberculosis in much of the world – and they kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Some endemic diseases are allowed to spread unchecked because they don’t cause much harm. Others, like measles – which is no longer endemic in the United States – may require major interventions: surveillance and testing across continents, intensive case investigation, and mitigation efforts from vaccination to education.

People know how to protect themselves from the flu and what to do if they’re infected, and for most, it’s not a burden on their lives. Health experts are hopeful that people can develop a similar rhythm with Covid.

“Covid-19 is different from the flu, and we have to treat it differently from the flu. But the flu gives us a little bit of an outline,” said Dr. Stephen Parodi, an executive vice president with Kaiser Permanente.

There’s a mighty range to what endemic Covid might look like, and it’s dependent on both viral and human behavior. Abandoning Covid controls too fast or too soon could allow the virus to circulate at much higher levels than most health experts would prefer and put new strains on the health care system. The next variant could yet again upend best laid plans if it further evades immunity, and especially if it causes more serious illness.

“That’s the thing that keeps us up at night,” said Dr. Ori Tzvieli, acting health officer for Contra Costa County. If another troublesome variant arrives, he said, “even when we’re in an endemic state, we will need a massive set of responses. It could involve closures or restrictions, it could involve mass vaccination campaign, it could involve a new kind of vaccine or booster. We have to be prepared for that.”

Some key uncertainties about what endemic Covid will look like include whether it becomes seasonal, like the flu, and what kind of baseline level of disease might exist.

When California reopened last June – after vaccines had become widely available and people were feeling confident that Covid could be well controlled – cases had dropped to fewer than 3 per 100,000 residents statewide. Most experts agreed that was a low enough level to live with over the long term.

Then the delta variant struck, and it became clear that much higher levels of immunity would be needed to prevent further surges. Omicron drove that point home even further. Since August, California has only dipped below 10 cases per 100,000 for a few days at a time. Under the state’s previous color-coded tier system, even that amount of virus would have prompted widespread economic shutdowns.

And at the peak of omicron, the state was reporting more than 300 cases a day per 100,000 residents. Even now, as the surge wanes, well over 100 cases a day per 100,000 residents are being reported.

It’s not clear yet where the coronavirus might land in a steady state – if the Bay Area, or anywhere, can get to a baseline of 1 or 2 cases per 100,000 residents, as previously hoped. And it may be many months, or even longer, before any consistent baseline is reached.

“There’s a desire for absolute clarity – when is Covid endemic? We need to understand there’s not an off-on switch,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, head of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

“Omicron has shown us that we can’t prevent every case,” Colfax said, but it was also a valuable stress test about how the city can manage Covid even with a lot of virus in the community. “If you had told me last year that we would have a variant that had us hitting 250 cases per 100,000 – that’s incredible. This test was emblematic of how far we’ve come in two years. We need to recognize that and understand that this helps guide us to managing a more endemic state.”

Tools that most people – at least in the Bay Area – have become comfortable using to protect themselves and others likely will remain in play for some time, maybe years. Mandates will be peeled away, and if they return they likely will be more targeted to certain spaces or populations. But people will be encouraged to do everything from getting boosters to putting their masks back on if – or when – cases surge again.

Many experts note that once Covid is endemic, it will be as important as ever to protect the most vulnerable: whether they’re immunocompromised individuals, older nursing home residents, front-line workers without good access to health care or families in Black and brown communities that have been hardest hit throughout the pandemic.

“If we do get to endemic, Covid will still be a potentially harmful disease, especially for our most socially and physically vulnerable groups,” said Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University.

“We have to make choices that are responsible for ourselves and for others,” she said. “As much as some of us would like to perhaps exit that reality, and imagine a timeline where we don’t have to be thinking about Covid and about people who are more vulnerable than ourselves, those people are reality too.”