or pbs el paso shall be responsible for the views opinions or facts expressed by the panelists on this television program please consult your doctor hello this is catherine berg and you are watching the el paso physician the coven 19 variants the good the bad and the ugly no kidding that is the title of tonight's program although we know a lot about the covet 19 uh the vaccines we know a lot about what's going on there's a lot of questions that we still have to ask there's the delta variant we're talking about that a lot right now we're talking about boosters literally just talked about the doctors on where the fda stands with that where the cdc stands we know um but there's stuff that's going on every five minutes that we're going to figure out this is a live program so we know you have questions give us a call three 881-013 want to let you know that um the vaccines are super effective we're not here to tell you what to do we're really not but we are definitely here to stress that there is an increased risk for severe disease and for hospitalizations if you do not have the vaccine there are questions again call us 881-0013 this evening is uh underwritten by sunset id care that is dr olosi over here we also want to thank the texas tech palo foster school of medicine for providing the medical students to man our phones we have actually two special guests with us this evening we have rihabti and naisia and she is going to be answering some of the phones and uh getting your questions sending them my way and then we also have a new gentleman with us and he is compiling a synopsis of the el paso for the el paso county medical society for the archives and so uh sakib shahid and both of them are in their second year of medical school and that being said that means that they just passed first year so good job good job we appreciate you guys being here um again this is from texas tech palo foster school of medicine i'm katharine berg and you are watching a special edition on covet 19 variants and what are we doing now on the all passive position i'm katharine berg thanks again for joining us uh we have a lot of stuff going on this evening we have with us dr elozie who is infectious disease and also you're not affectionate you are specializing in infectious diseases you are not an infectious disease the way that came out of my mouth wasn't very nice uh specializing in infectious disease he's also the ceo of sunset id care and that is the underwriting entity of our program this evening and also dr hector ocaranza who is a pd pediatrician and he's with the city county health authority and i saw your fancy car outside it's kind of cool to see that logo on the uh the county health car but both of you all have been knee-deep in all of this for 17 18 19 20 months now and so tonight is all about covet 19 the delta variant the good bad and the ugly and respectfully about the science behind what's going on and again i do want to stress this is a medical program so we obviously as a medical community are stressing that getting the vaccine absolutely is the best way to stay away from major illness and from hospitalization so um there are questions feel free to ask us we're going to go first to dr ellosie and even though i described who you are and what you do this is this is the game of the night right it's like what do you do all day every day and i know right now it's changing daily but on that note number one thank you for being here thank you for what you do both of you i mean you've been so busy over the last many many months but explain to our audience who you are boom there it is drop the mic i'm dr carranza's friend you know i think i spend a lot of time texting hector i text them on sunday nights on wednesday nights there's a host of things that i'll be like hey what is this i'm hearing what's going on and we've had a great relationship throughout this whole time pardon the we know that there is static my apologies i just want to acknowledge you obvious every now and again on live tv that happens so my apologies for that go ahead sorry no but i think um one of the things that i've sort of been dedicated to as i've transitioned out of my old role as chief medical officer at del sol medical center and to just being a physician in the community he's trying to help our community get straightforward facts right let's not get buried in the politicization of a lot of things and i tell people all the time at the end of the day you have a right to do whatever you want to do but there are also going to be other rights that may override you the right of the public throughout the community the right of my children and your children and your children are to be in a safe school environment and i think that we are in a state right now where we just have to be careful we've been blessed and sometimes better to be lucky than to be good around how good we're doing in covid today that doesn't mean that it's the same that it will be in october or november exactly let's enjoy those gains let's make sure we sort of capitalize on them and get the messages out to people that if you're not vaccinated this truly is the most dangerous time to be unvaccinated in america and and really around the world and i appreciate you saying that and again there is so much going on dr okranza um same question to you i know that your job has been not a lot different but a lot different over the last year and a half so describing to the audience what it is that you do all day aside from being dr losey's best friend well definitely we text each other but definitely the the job that we do in public health and basically he goes unnoticed until something happens in public health when everything is going well people are not dying from food poisoning and people are having healthy habits because of public health so that's where we come into play but with pandemics such as this one then it becomes a very important position and it takes the lead in what the interventions have to do to keep our community safe definitely experts like dr losi makes all this a lot better having to interact with him we're very good friends and we exchange a lot of thoughts and a lot of ideas and a lot of creative ways in which we continue protecting our community because the love that we have for our community the passion that we have for the for the medical aspects of just this it's amazing so we will never see another pandemic again until probably the kids of our kids oh thank god that's nice to just hear out loud honestly exactly but definitely there's going to be a lot of lessons learned right there's going to be a lot of ways that we probably could improve but there's going to be a lot of ways that we did right and as dr lawson said we're doing very good in our community right now because of all the people that decided to go and get the vaccine right we have a beautifully proactive with health community here in el paso and um and dr loz you've been sending me throughout the week just different articles that we have and how well el paso is doing when it comes to not only being vaccinated but to people who are continuing to wear their masks people who are taking a front line and really being proactive about their health about their children's health on that note i'm going to ask you first and the same question is going to come to you what are because everybody knows who you are and what you're doing what are the questions that come your way most days and maybe even the last couple of weeks with the variance and now with the possibility of a booster and i know first it would be like the vaccines people who are in compromised health would get those first etc etc but i'm here to ask you what your questions are being asked of you like and again maybe that changes it's been changing over the last couple of weeks i think the questions that i get the most over the last two weeks are what's this delta variant do i have to be worried about it does it change my vaccination status my friends that are not vaccinated and they're very few and far between actually to tell the truth should i get vaccinated now and my answer is pretty consistent right but at the end of the day it's a risk equation right everybody has to take their own personal harm and personal risk into account if you're above 65 and you're not vaccinated the odds are over the next three to six months you'll end up in one of our hospitals right right and i think that's just the reality and i see them every day the 65 year old the 82 year old they just said i was gonna wait i didn't trust the vaccine and now they're on their front which is called prone position and about to be intubated they could have done better i think if you're a 25 30 year old maybe your risk isn't as high but you may live with somebody right right and what we're seeing in dr cronzo knows is that we're getting younger and younger people in the hospital i think it's important for people to understand it doesn't mean the delta variant is more virulent or that makes you more sick but again we've taken a population that didn't have covid throughout the pandemic and now has it exactly ramped up that number so it's simple population metrics if it was one percent of a hundred thousand now it's one percent of 200 000 more people that are younger that aren't protected are going to be in the hospital and so people travel keep your thought but i want uh for the folks in the back uh if you can put up slide one i know that our monitor is not operating right now that's why we've been kind of going back and forth really quick but if we can put up slide one if somebody can let us know that's up and slide one would be you know which one's i know dr lizzy sent those so slide one is up and so that's exactly what dr lozy is talking about when we look at this graph and sort of walk people that are looking at this on screen through this i think what this really is is what is your risk vaccinated compared to unvaccinated you've heard this sort of term or the jingoism around this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated it may not be 100 that but if you're vaccinated you have 25 times reduction in your ability to be in the hospital you have 25 time reduction in your ability of death from covid and i think that's critical a lot of people catherine dr caronza will talk about breakthrough infections and i get it we're not in the situation that we're in with a worldwide pandemic because of flu symptoms right we're not there because people got a cold and got sick if that was what it was nobody would have cared we're there because of the catastrophic nature to our health care system in the amount of debt 650 000 and counting that occurred and i think people really need to think about that let's take a step back nobody cares about breakthrough infections in a sense right we're trying to protect lives and i think that's what we are trying to do as a public health community and as a healthcare community i like the way you said that and i'm going to transition that to dr okranza really quick because you talked about hospital situations and available beds and i know we talked about texas and available beds dr okranza if you can talk about yes this is life death illnesses but at the end of the day if there's someone in our family or something we know that cannot get access to a hospital bed and that's what we're talking about because hospitals as you said earlier there's only so much that we've ever expected to occupy hospital space now that is a very different equation than in the past so those people who are like oh if i get sick i'll be fine or whatever talk about hospital space icu space it's morbid but to go to morgue space etc but talk about where the stresses of the system come in and why that's such a big part to play in the vaccines right now you were talking about responsibility to the public that's a responsibility to the public yes and that is extremely important because we lifted in october and november we have a health professional shortage area here in el paso meaning that we don't have enough physicians we don't have enough nurses we don't have enough but the staff that can take care of people when they get sick so dr lawson talked very eloquently about how many people get infected at the same time we have a specific number of hospital beds so if at the same time we have 10 of the population we have a population of 870 000 people in el paso so 10 of the population is 87 000 people that are going to be coming to the hospital there's not enough space exactly simple as that if it's going to be your dad if it's going to be your mom you would want somebody to take care of that ailment that needs hospital care and how can we do it is it's not going to be it will be too late right to think about the vaccination it will be too late to think about prevention so that's what we we talk in public health in the healthcare system how can we prevent to getting to that point exactly well there's many steps in prevention and now suppression is worth a lot more than just a pound of just the care that we needed at that time so that that is extremely important because yes we might not care about the neighbor we may not care about somebody else in our city right but we care about our loved ones our parents our grandparents that live with us we're a community has multi-generational writing within the same house right and there's something too that that you kind of alluded to earlier that somebody having a heart attack is not going away during coven somebody having a stroke is not going away doing covid somebody ha being in a big car crash that's not going away either so the hospital space matters there are there are doctors and there are literally facilities being drawn in every area we have our first question here from the audience and doctor losing to send this to you because it's right on what you were talking about and thank you who's calling in because you're trying to convince someone to get a vaccine a person on the line has a son who's 28 years old the 28 year old is not vaccinated because he's worried about the lack of supporting data so that's where i want to go traveling the 28 year old is traveling to rhode island where grandma is and grandma is also not vaccinated how can we convince the 28 year old to get the vaccine thank you for the caller that asked that question that is precisely why we're here this afternoon or this evening so dr lozy go and you're welcome to join in on this as well you know i think when i talk to your son out there i would just tell him listen this is not january right this is not april may or june the delta variant changes the equation around all of this i get it you're young you're invincible but grandma's not invincible right and on the odd chance that you were to contract while you drive or while you fly while you stop at a gas station and give your unvaccinated grandmother this disease it probably would be a death sentence her chances of survival of that age group are really small and i'll tell this anecdote right so i did a great job i think personally right um sort of pat yourself on the shoulder i'm not getting covered throughout the pandemic i got on my first flight throughout the year of 2020 went for a meeting in dallas came back and a week later i had covet nobody i know it was interesting right the only time i broke what i called for my protocol and i got covered i didn't expect to get covered and so tell your son that it can happen to anybody right you don't expect to get it you can't see it right your mask only protects you about 30 of the time well you really want to protect his grandma that's why you need to protect her she needs to protect herself and that would be the plea that i would make to him okay i like that very much and it just so happens we have a slide slide number two gracie if you are able to put that one up but this slide shows by u.s county infections infections versus the vaccinations and dr lozie i heard you talking about this on a video earlier today and i know you can't see it but slide number two is up and we were talking about vaccinations per county per area of the united states so this particular person who is traveling from el paso to rhode island etc explain what side number two is showing people at home and why it's so important when you're when you're talking about traveling and also kind of looking at where you're going what the vaccination rate is in the areas that you're traveling to absolutely so one of the things i've been saying consistently is we're not baton rouge we're not new orleans and we're not miami or dade county our vaccination rate is very different and so if you look at that slide the more vaccination rate you have in your community the less the amount of cases and that's what we're seeing now again vermont is probably like us right they look like us in terms of vaccination rate and the amount of cases that they have but there's still a risk because you have to drive there you have to get on a plane if you could transport or teleport yourself that would be great but you can't i think that really has to be the consideration where are you going why are you going and how are you going to take your sort of covert protocol to protect yourself and your family i'm going to ask you in a moment i'm going to ask you about percentages of vaccinations just to get that in your mindset but i'm going to ask you a moment because you you did some international travel i'm about to do some international travel and i want to talk about that idea in the the mind space that you are at regarding travel and who's getting vaccinated et cetera dr okaranza and i i'm throwing this your way and if you don't have particular percentages i totally get it but how are we doing and let's take this in three different ways how are we doing in america with our vaccination rates maybe compared to just whatever ones and feel free to jump into whichever areas around the world vaccination rates and then el paso el paso again we're doing pretty good we've got some good thank you our region's great but just in general if you can throw out to the best of your knowledge where we are massa menos with vaccination rates well vaccination rate in the u.s is about 50 okay completed immunization schedule so that means one hour one out of two has full immunization against covet full that means their second dose their second dose they receive the johnson and johnson which is only one dose okay here in el paso we have seven out of ten which is all more more easily as dr lawson mentioned delta variant here is spreads a lot easier through those people that are considered susceptible so the less people that we have susceptible the less fire we have for the the less wood we have for this fire the less it's going to burn so the better we have this immunization rates the less we're going to be having the spread of the disease in those communities there's countries that have a very nice and very high immunization because of their system israel is one of them qatar is another one which is up in the 90s up in the 90s fully vaccinated yes and a lot of the nice studies have come from those places which gives us a lot of good real world data and information and how people respond to the vaccine how much protection we have from that how much we it spreads the disease through those countries that are very well vaccinated so so we're having a lot of good data that we're having to see their experiences every country and every community is different because of the demographics and the way that they display all the disease their genetic background but definitely we need to take all those uh points into consideration so we can address it locally exactly and locally and publicly and dr lozy i would love for you and you touched on it earlier that people are asking you what exactly does it mean when people say that the delta variant and um if you could put it in the layman terms because yes people say god i'm tired of it i'm tired of it fine be tired of it but it's not gone yet like you said it's here to stay so when we're talking about the delta variant it's more you can catch it easier yeah and that's the key that's the key and so if you can kind of go on that way for a while so i think in all viruses we've known this for a very long time but taking covets specifically the real questions that you have to ask are is it more transmissible and the answer is yes now experts can argue oh there's twice as transmissible four times as transmissible we know it's more transmissible is it more deadly or is it more virulent the jury is out on that there's some studies that show it maybe other studies show it doesn't and the last piece is does it evade what's called immune capture or will it evade the vaccines also right now no evidence of that that's a huge point if you could repeat that critical does it evade does it encapsulate immune capture does it evade our ability of the vaccines to work i think the jury is out on that what we do seem to see and we'll talk about that in a bit is that in those that got vaccine six months eight months ten months ago there seems to be a waning antibody level right antibiotics are that sort of first line of attack against covalent so that's why you're hearing about the cdc and the fda saying we need to bring back boosters and those that are immune compromised the expectation is that that may expand to others by the end of the year not today but again those are all the things that come into play one of the other things you sort of talked about was well what does this variant mean right i truly believe that a virus can only mutate a certain amount of times once the virus mutates too much it loses what's called its viral fitness its ability to infect us and so you may have a virus that evades the vaccines and it can't replicate it can't infect us because the virus think about it like a can of cilantro it kind of dilutes itself yeah think about like a can of silly party that you give to three different kids right they may create three different things one's going to be prettier than the other one's going to be taller than the other the virus only has a certain amount of play-doh styles that it has to really be an efficient virus so far this is the most efficient virus we don't know it'll come in the future i really like the way you describe that too and again a virus can only mutate so many times eventually it will dilute but in the meantime with these variants um like you said the jury's still out but until we get there the vaccines are there a question here from the audience and i'm just going to throw this out because again this is going to be one of the shows that i'm just going to look at both of you if you raise your hand it's yours 73 year old male has taken two doses of moderna already he's taking prostate cancer medications and this is all about the booster should he be in line for a booster is he eligible for a booster and i know the jury's out i know we just finished talking about fda's talking about that as we speak here this evening what are the uh on either one of your ends in the medical community dr okaranza that is your question and again i know we don't have specific answers i get it uh but at the end of the day the question is who you no booster for you booster for you maybe for you not so much for you i mean how is that being decided well based on the studies that they have done and based on the evidence that we have with the breakthrough infections with the immunity then one thing that probably all the the scientific community agrees that booster for everybody is going to be an honor is going to be a what and no no no okay and no for now because the company came too fast to say yeah i'm going to recommend booster for everybody ah right right now wait a second right okay not for you right maybe for you but definitely for you and that's what we're trying to decide and we we all agree that you mean to compromise people people that have the cancer treatment people that are up there in age with many multiple pre-existing conditions there's a lot of people that have autoimmune conditions that need to be having their immune system kind of tame which is puts them at risk of developing other diseases those are the group of people that definitely we love to have the booster shop because we need to have them very well protected otherwise they're going to be coming back having infected with the delta variant having complications ending up in the hospital and that goes back to when we hear on the news a lot those people who have passed often you heed the words with underlying conditions and this is what we're talking about people that um and dr lozy i'd like to take this back to you you were infected you had your vaccination both of them fully vaccinated like you said and i think all of us too were kind of a medical field i pretty much only hang out with people who are vaccinated and it's it's by choice and i'm lucky that way because my work environment is vaccinated i choose with my personal environment only be with people vaccinated but when you're traveling or if you are in a position of work where you're not always dealing with people who are vaccinated et cetera being vaccinated you got coveted and the reason i'm saying this out loud and making a point about vaccination pre-vaccination yes oh you got covered pre-vaccination oh i did not know that so that completely changes my question so let's talk about okay good let's change that question so now you have antibodies from having covid you got through it thank god now you have vaccination boosted myself and you boosted yourself after the antibodies absolutely um when you had kovid the first time you know what that changes the whole scenario of what i'm trying to say but so let me go back sorry about this sorry audience i was on the phone with someone yesterday who has been vaccinated twice is in an environment did get covered as a vaccinated individual is slightly ill thankfully there is a lingering cough there's a lingering snack in the other but again he's vaccinated thank goodness because if he wasn't vaccinated what may happen and again my question here is it's not going to technically 100 keep you from getting covered but it will protect you from getting severe disease and hospitalization that's where i'm trying to go with this and that's where i was trying to go goodness gracious and i started that to begin with i think we need to have a sort of come to jesus moment in our community yes and not a lot of people have this conversation i think what's important to note is that covid or stars cov2 the actual virus is going to become endemic in our community and our society there are too many people that have it there are too many animal reservoirs and it's an aerosolized virus right we need to understand that the vaccines are going to protect us not protect us from getting a cold not protect us from getting a boo-boo not protect us from getting the things that we've lived with for 100 years as a human society but protect us from going to the hospital and dying and i think that really has to be the key and so yes your friend did get covered it's very possible that he got covert i mean one of the clinical things i would ask is well when did he get vaccinated who has he been around did he travel but the long and short of it is that the vaccine worked right it worked out exactly how we expected it to work he got covered he did not go to the hospital he felt crappy for a few days and hopefully he'll get better over the next few days and that is exactly how a vaccine should work that's the most important thing and i'm glad that you you said that uh question here from the audience and i'm just going to throw it out there and this is a good question this is a so with the booster and or let's say this is the booster is the medicine given now the same as it was given initially or has it been modified for the variant now you kind of touch base on that and i'm i'm happy to give that to whoever wants it or even both of you dr okranza that's a great question because you think okay you've you've got vaccine number one you have vaccine number two are they the same vaccine booster is coming up will that be the same vaccine so however and again you've got the whole question of pfizer moderna johnson and johnson i i respect that that's all in there as well but i guess the the basic question is the way that your body responds to the first vaccine it does its own thing you get the second vaccine is it the same is it different well the first thousands the second dose is the same vaccine but what we're trying to do is train your body train your immune system to recognize that picture of that virus and then when he finds it in the community or when your interactions with other people is going to have the ability to recognize and fight it and not create that infection or that severe disease so that's that's the job of that vaccine many people say well that vaccine was produced way too fast that's one of the questions like no it's been in the works for many many many many years but that technology that took a long time to do now we're able to change them all and grab them all from the covet virus and put it there and now we're producing comet now we're producing maybe ebola vaccine exactly so that is the beauty of that the vaccine so i tell the people the vaccine is not our enemy it's our friend that's what's going to keep us alive and kobe is not another flu covet is not another call we wouldn't be having like dr los he said that conversation because well yeah we all get sick with the call we recover a few people die of a call more people die of the flu but a lot more people die of colin so i'm going to take us back to and i think it was march 12th of 2019 when i had both you guys on and it was oh gosh this coveted thing is here and the reason it's called covet 19 is it's 2019 which means kovit's been around for a really really long time and to your point because i do have a question here from the audience can we provide clear data on showing effectiveness effectiveness of the vaccine and benefits outweighing side effects et cetera et cetera this is not something that was just whooped up in a bowl over the last couple of months please yes and i'm going to be really clear about this if in august of 2021 we're still having an effectiveness or an efficacy conversation you're not getting vaccinated we need to accept that for some people there are some we're never going to get to 100 percent you're right but you're killing it i think that's okay right yeah in august of 2021 there's been over a thousand public papers published on vaccine efficacy we vaccinated well over 100 million people in the world that's no longer a question we need to have a conversation about that's not up for debate what's up for debate and i think it's fair is what to do about boosters right some people will call them the third shot in the series not a booster with the third shot in a series for people that are immunocompromised what's up for debate is how we manage children five to 11. what's up for debate is how we manage children less than five what's up for debate is do we do this on a yearly basis and i apologize but if you're a person that truly wants to have a conversation about do vaccines work that's okay let's move on right you're going to be at 10 to 20 of the world that doesn't get vaccinated of america actually and we'll move on and you take your risk and just like any other risk smoking driving without a seat belt drunk driving take your risk and we'll take care of when you come to our hospitals we want to focus on the public health and how do we get our public safe and i think that really has to be the key we've spent a lot of time in america dealing with individuals that have no hope to ever get the vaccine and i think it's taken us backwards because we've refused to acknowledge the potency power and effectiveness of the vaccines we've gotten caught up in the naysayers and the paranoia and the people that don't believe that vaccines will ever work and i think that's okay let's move that aside now and let's focus on how do we protect our community i love that you said that and i think that's a nice way to move on to some of the things that we don't exactly know yet but a lot of the questions are the five to 11 year olds 12 and up no question go go go 5 to 11 i'm just i'm just doing ping pong table right now 5 to 11. where are we i know that's again not a magic answer but to the best of your ability where are we with five to eleven and i know from zero to five that's a whole different ballgame that's a whole different ballgame because yes definitely they need to keep an eye on and throw pregnancies in there as well sorry just to add another one it's pregnancy you throw it with all the twelve and up and down okay pregnancies pregnancy is 12 and up that means completely clear for vaccination yeah i just want to say it out loud we can we can go on and on with the benefits of getting the vaccination when you're pregnant when you're breastfeeding it protects the babies because we have one day old baby two day old baby infected by the parents that didn't want to get vaccinated that they're positive for kobe so now the parents are concerned like well we need to protect those babies they don't have that protection that that they need that they could have gotten before the during pregnancy before yeah exactly exactly moving back to the 5-11 interesting because you have that group in between how much is the dose that is going to be the correct dose that you need to give this kid the children have a very very impressive response to something foreign that's why we have the multi-system inflammatory syndrome which is a very exaggerated response and inflammation and everything that is so active in their body that creates damage to their own body so how can we we're going to be giving the vaccine that is not going to trigger that but it's going to trigger the right response that we need to protect them but also be able to protect the ones that are around them so it is the whole cocooning effect that we're going to be having by protecting everybody in specifically those that can potentially have those complications and die so i want to go a little bit more as i know we talked about this on a pediatrician program before and covid so talk about multi-system inflammatory condition what's happening there so we say inflammatories i know we talk about lungs lungs lungs this affects the lungs but when you're younger that's the condition that we're looking at a bit so i'd like to just go a little bit deeper on what that is well what that is is that their bodies of these children produce so much substances that are used to fight infections to fight something foreign but it produces in a nexus that is going to cause harm to their own body so you have damage in the lungs in the heart and the brain kidneys and we have children that can present very sick and it happens four six weeks after they were exposed or after they were infected so it doesn't happen right away but it happens sometime later and that is extremely important to know that because of the this systemic reaction or reaction all over the body you're going to have problems with inflammation of the heart that can have long-lasting effects and we're talking little ones five or six out of ten and it's not 10 cases of myocarditis inflammation of the heart because of the vaccine that has given 500 million doses so talking about risks like like my good friend dr losses said talking about risk having a child with multi-system inflammatory syndrome that has five or six out of ten kids that have the heart inflamed compared to 10 out of half of 500 million doses that we have given it's completely different so i'm a parent don't want to take the chances of having my kid developing that exactly and i will give the vaccine to my kid right so it's the whole household it is it is important i have so many questions it's not even funny so um eight pieces of paper and i've got them coming in like crazy so we were talking about kids those that are not able to get vaccinated 12 and under there is school active right now both of our kids are in same school district there you go so we and i do not want to get into politics however there is a fact that right now our state is not a mandate but el paso is and school teachers are and parents this is where you come into you have the right to put a mask on your child or not but again we're talking about public health and dr lozy i like how no apologies earlier you're stating things as you feel as a medical professional as an infectious disease specialist let's talk about school right now please what what are you saying to parents of kids under the age of 12. again over 12 definitely get them vaccinated let's say first grade to 12 years old yeah so i think it is to me it's not as clear-cut but i think every parent has a decision to make if you have concerns if you're worried or the mask because here's the thing and i've struggled with this over the last three months myself there are very few downsides to wearing a mask right especially in the average child you may have child with special needs that need verbal cues from the face you may have child children that have respiratory issues you can have that argument we can settle that but on average and i think we've gotten that we continue to argue about the margins and i think that's what's really gotten us into trouble in this sort of covid paranoia fear porn pandemic that we've gotten into what we're not talking about is the average person right we can take exceptional care of the margins the average kid my 11 year old your 11 year old right my 14 year old they'll wear a mask and they'll be fine when they're outside and when they're eating they won't wear a mask because that makes sense and on average they're protected i think and i will sort of push a little bit back on the school districts the school districts i feel and again this is not scientific are spending more energy on masking than vaccinating their staff and their teachers what a and here's where i'm going to be really clear vaccines work 80 to 95 that's the data it's clear maths work anywhere from twenty to sixty percent if i'm going to spend my bang for my book go get your teachers and your staff taxes and protect my child right right and then we'd have a less of a conversation now i get it kids should wear masks parents that want to should get them to our mass we're in a state and dr akaranza knows this that the politics aren't going to allow us to mandate it so we need to move beyond that conversation because it's a it's a barrier to the next step but everybody wants to fight about the mandate we could spend the next year in the mandate and we've done no action let's take the action to protect our children protect our children let's move forward let's say this evening's conversation is breaking into some of the homes this evening and vaccines they're like okay i'm going to go get vaccinated tomorrow and my apologies i usually have this like up front i know that the county coliseum and or this who who's doing vaccines like who who's doing vaccines like tomorrow i'm going to get the whole family in the bus and we're going to have vaccines where can people go tomorrow civic center civic center there you go free parking you go there don't need appointment you can get your 12 year old your 14 year old yourself bring everybody that's how you get it you can go to your neighborhood pharmacy as well there's some pop-up events and we put them in the epstrom.org website so there's plenty of opportunities school districts are having events as well so we the health department has done a wonderful job with the office of emergency management to have all those pop-up events partner with a lot of people so we can have no excuses for for everybody to get vaccinated so we make it more accessible convenient and and just we need to be there and i agree yes please i i really need to send a shout out to dr coronza the public health department the city the hospitals of providence the community that has done this there was an article in the guardian yes that's when i was last friday right and it said how is el paso doing so well in covet when the rest of texas is drowning it's because of the work they did yes it's because of the work that our community has done and so again my mom always used to say you can't rest on your oars right but i think we need to take a quick rest and say hey we've put in the work as a community and so kudos to them now we need to continue to protect the community right exactly and nicely said and again you mentioned it dr okaranza epstrom.org very very important because you can get on there all the places that the vaccine is being distributed again if you just want to go in your car go to the civic center bring everybody that you can above the age of 12 that can be vaccinated uh those that are 12 then you just need to have a parent or a guardian with them again all the pharmacies cvs walgreens walmart any place albertsons any place that has a pharmacy i maybe telephone first i'm not exactly sure how they're doing appointments but they are bottom line is vaccines are free they're available to everyone they are plentiful now i know that there was a while the first couple of months into the year we didn't have a lot of vaccines demand was not uh being uh anyway right now we have supply that absolutely needs a demand and then some so doctor i thought you're gonna say something doctor oh you're just okay so a question here from the audience um and again this is a booster question and we've answered it but i want to respect the question when how and where can immune compromised elders get a booster shot is there a referral needed again we're not exactly sure but i do want to honor this question because right we're not future tellers but the expectation is that the fda will make an announcement tomorrow hopefully this weekend cdc asip the advisory committee on immunization practices will meet over the weekend latest by monday and i believe that in the next seven days they'll bring out guidance on who can get booster shots and where okay very important on that question here again from the audience uh we're talking about mass specifications um and i know we talked about that yes please oh good doctor go for that i'll jump in okay i'll do a read my mind excellent okay um we've talked about masks a lot throughout the pandemic and at certain points of the pandemic we didn't use n95s because they were scarce we gave them to healthcare workers to protect them we're not in that stage of the pandemic anymore and so when i say masks i don't mean cloth masks i don't mean fabric masks if you're wearing a mask in august and beyond of 2021 to protect yourself against the delta variant it has to be an n95 or a can 95 or at the very least a surgical mask that you're trying to change after three to four hours when it gets wet those are the conversations around masks if we're talking about cloth it doesn't cut it anymore this isn't you know what repeat that because this is something that's new to me right now so 95 okay k 95 or k okay at the worst a surgical and if it's a surgical you should be changing it out when it gets wet or moist or broken and we at this point can get those anywhere amazon.com sells them walgreens cvs your friend might have it in his backyard right go get a can 95 and an n95 if you truly want to protect yourself so the cloth that your aunt made the cloth mask that's not cutting it right now because again the variant is much more transmissible that's what we're talking about right now it can be caught a lot quicker thank you for saying that and again they are available everywhere and for the most part they're very affordable i think that's that's a big thing here um question here from the audience again and i don't want to spend too much time on this but a person had covet in october still doesn't have a sense of taste um they understand so this is really covid recovery so they're talking about a place in san antonio that has a covid recovery program uh like breathing programs do we have something like that in el paso that is like a rehab for people who have had covet doctor okadanza i see your face something very important because this question is going to be great people are asking well what are the long-term effects of the vaccine well long-term effects of the vaccine you're sleeping you're still going to get a lot you're still going to be alive you're still going to be out of the hospital long-term effects of the common infection central nervous system you can continue having those problems with smelling parkinson's some they call it covet lagoons that you you have foggy brain you can have scars in your lung tissue you can have problems in your heart definitely not a good place to be if you got infected with a corvette great to prevent that there's some places here in town that can follow up and treat some of those covet patients that definitely are great to to go okay and i i i feel in the last couple of days and correct me if i'm wrong i think umc actually has a unit that talks about re some kind of rehab from leftover coke it's leftover long-haul covert issues i think most of that is breathing centered around breathing i could be wrong so please look it up um again el paso strong ep strong not el paso strong it's ep ep for el paso epstrom.org is definitely the place to go on that okay we are in like those fire rapid 10 minutes that are left dr rosie what have we not talked about yet that you want to get across tonight i feel like we've talked about most things right thank god but let's keep going um i got a question this afternoon about what people should do with meetings a big guess right i think are we still zooming well i think in our community is different than what they're doing in miami and it's different than what they're doing in austin and i think that's a good thing i think people have to start having conversations with their employees about if you're coming to work you must be vaccinated right now there will be employers out there that say well i can't do it because of the legal ramifications i'd actually say that's not true methodists in houston told 13 of their workforce that if you're not vaccinated by a certain date you can't come back there were two legal challenges and it was struck down they had that right the department of defense announced yesterday that they planned by october 1st to have all of their military members vaccinated the expectation that the fda will approve this vaccine fully in the month of september and then it will be really interesting in our community where employers potentially don't want to get people vaccinated but are arguing about masking again i think it's important if we're thinking about the hierarchy of data yes masking or other vaccine trump's masking right we're going to spend our energy let's put it on vaccines it's like vaccine is the not the cure it's a wrong word but it's a band-aid masking right now is a band-aid when you're looking at vaccine that is really a widespread type thing i know united airlines is i just saw that on the news a couple of days ago people are differentially choosing to fly united instead of southwest american and delta because of that decision that they've made speaking of and i'm not one to advertise i'm going to germany in less than three weeks and i it's like up in the air and honest to god that was a decision so um you just came back from the uk and you experi again this is these are thankfully first world countries that we're talking about currently there are countries that don't have great vaccination rates those that do talk about your experience and if anyone is listening that and this is not just a vacation there are family issues that i needed to deal with in germany and that's why i'm going i mean this is one of those kind of first world problem issues right so i have family there i had an opportunity to go i'm vaccinated my wife is vaccinated my 14 year old is vaccinated my 11 year old isn't and so we thought about it sort of hard right but we were sort of comforted by the fact that all of our friends that we would be around are all vaccinated all the spaces that we had unvaccinated people would be wearing masks in the underground on the plane but around our friends all vaccinated went came back had a great vacation and everybody's safe and sound and so again i think people need to understand right covet is not a one-to-one risk because dr akaranza has covet doesn't mean that you or i will get it during this program right but our risk is much reduced if you're vaccinated i'm vaccine and if he's vaccinated exactly what we know is that vaccinated people may have the same viral load as an unvaccinated person but they shed less right the virus is less viable and so vaccine solves a lot of these riddles right i say all the time if covet is the riddle the vaccine is the solution and so we have to take that into account especially if this is going to be endemic over the next years to come we're going to be having arguments and conversations about a yearly shot a bi-yearly shot who should get it at some point in time what you will see is that communities that are highly vaccinated are moving on communities that are unvaccinated will continue to suffer the toil of the up and down valium peaks of people in their hospitals and i love how you said it people that have the vaccine shed less so even if they do get covered the people around them there's less of that coming off of them so thank you so much for saying that dr okranza um i know it is fast fire but is there anything you want to get across before we go back to some of these questions yes definitely and one thing that probably we haven't touched much on is people that have symptoms especially now that we're having a lot of more respiratory issues respiratory viruses in our community if you have symptoms go and get tested yes whether you have the vaccine or not definitely go and get tested because that's the way that you need to be responsible with yourself responsible with the rest of your co-workers your house and and definitely we're going to be seeing people that are infected and and we haven't talked much about the testing but it is quite important on that note and again i should know this yes yes dr kronzer brings up a huge point in terms of schools masking is one thing vaccines are another thing if you're sick get tested yeah what we've seen we've seen an up uptick in testing recently but on average a lot of people are doing the binax now the home testing kits that don't get counted if you feel you're sick or your kid is sick test them don't send them to school sick we need to get out of that culture of just manning up or warming up and going to school or to work sick get tested this is going to be a sort of muscle memory that we need to learn if you're sick get tested if you're positive stay home right yeah on that note where do people get tested you talked about the test that you can buy at a store there's some yeah some pharmacies have testing but also epstrom.org you can find the closest testing site the office of emergency management has set up a lot more testing and we've seen a huge uptake in the testing that it points to toward the direction that people are getting more symptoms people are getting sick and definitely that that's a good thing because we need to test a lot more people right so and we're heading back into flu season and i know that you know the discussion that we had last late winter is that a lot of people didn't get the flu why because people were masking up people were staying at home people weren't around that so at the end of the day you're going to start feeling sick it's good to know if you have covert or not to stay away from work site school etc so you were talking about the testing at home kit and i just i have a question here too what does that consist of uh when you go get tested it's you know the the brain the brain biopsy thank you because i felt like i didn't know how to describe it without being you get the brain biopsy um the home kit is at the same thing and are people really going to go up there you know themselves and get everything i mean i think i i actually enjoy not enjoy but i actually prefer doing my own nasal swab and to help somebody else do it i know how to get up there some are some of them are saliva some of them are oropharyngeal so at the back of your throat but i think again they're i think it's 29.95 at walgreens or cvs for two tests it's not inexpensive but again if you're concerned enough to get tested either go to the free testing sites the mega sites stepped up recently or get a home kit if you want to travel or if you have somebody coming into your home and you're concerned get tested i mean vaccines masking testing they all go together and we can't forget any piece of the puzzle i love that that's all pieces of puzzle because when you don't have that one piece it drives you nuts that's where we don't want to be um when you're traveling do people and this is something i've just heard maybe i'm just cued in on it because i know that we're going international are there testing happening at the airports like what was your experience with testing people that need to travel also need to remember that you need to test to leave the country you may need to test in the country you're going to you need to test to return to the country okay so plan those out right because what you don't want to do and i saw this at the airport somebody arrive at a country without a test right and you're turned back so on that note explain that so if you have not and this is on your own person to do this you need to take accountability for yourself and get tested it's not going to be a little guy at the airport that says i'm going to test you and then there's some kind of a and i apologize i don't know this but is there some kind of a card is there some kind of you're negative except you're going to talk your results when you show it at the airport you print out yours okay show at the airport okay dr ogranza i feel like there's something that we haven't talked about yet we talked about the vaccine again boosters i know this is something that fda like you said the next 24-48 hours is going to be some kind of an answer as to what is going to be going on with the booster shot at the end of the day the booster shot basically is the same shot if not is the same shot it's just how your body is starting to respond to that and either one of you can take that on because i think that's a continual question we talked about it it's a you know a vaccine that you get the second vaccine is basically the same vaccine it's how your body responds explain really quickly how your body responds when something foreign is given into it so this vaccine is foreign your body looks at and goes i don't like this and your body develops antibodies if you can explain to the audience how that works sorry i'm talking so fast no that's okay one analogy that i like to use is that the vaccine is going to be the blueprint of what a line of workers need to produce so you show the blueprint the workers start producing which is the cells in your body that has a picture of the virus and then the immune system which is the police is going to be having it in all other cars so when you find it then they attack it and they avoid that infection depending on the vaccine then you have a different blueprint or you have the fedex or the ups guy come and deliver it to you that's uh that's a different technology that they can use in the vaccine booster dose another reminder of the to the immune system one needs to be looking for in case the picture gets a little grainy not very identifiable because as we talked about it immunity might wane with time or the immune system is not a strong enough because you're underlying conditions or you're considered immunosuppressed and that's a nice way of explaining it too and again this is not going to be going away yes if you have you're fully vaccinated now this is going to be something for several years to come booster is going to be something just pay attention to the news and dear lord please go to websites that have a dot org at the end versus dot com just make sure that your information that you're getting is from validated sites i want to say thank you so much to dr lozie with sunset id care this is a such an enormously important program if you need to watch us again cause we did talk really really fast you can watch us again on pbselpaso.org also on the el paso county medical society's website that is epcms.com and youtube also has this and that's youtube.com look up el paso physician and also uh look up pbs el paso on youtube and you'll be able to find that i want to say thank you again to dr ocaranza and really everyone who's been we call them first line workers but everyone who's been in the puzzle piece putting together how our vaccinations are being distributed we had a program here back in december talking about how the vaccines are coming up so thank you very much for watching if you can get vaccinated you've been watching the el paso position i'm catherine berg good night [Music] [Music] you