Southern California’s troubling outlook for intensive care capacity has prompted state health officials to keep the region’s stay-at-home order in place, officials said Tuesday, Dec. 29.

That means indoor spaces at restaurants, fitness centers and many other businesses and public sectors will need to stay closed in the state’s most populous region.

New four-week projections that weigh current ICU capacity and admissions, as well as other coronavirus tracking metrics such as case and transmission rates, will decide going forward when the stricter stay-at-home order can be lifted.

If the projections – to be updated each day – show a region’s availability of adult ICU beds will be greater than 15% over the next month, it will be released from the order, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said during a news conference Tuesday.

The adjusted ICU capacity levels in the Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley regions remained at 0% as of Tuesday – both regions bottomed out nearly two weeks ago – though Ghaly reminded the public that the zero figure includes an adjustment to emphasize the taxing effect of COVID patients and doesn’t mean there are no beds left in the region’s hospitals.

“We essentially are projecting that the ICU capacity is not improving in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley and that demand will continue to exceed capacity,” Ghaly said.

It was unclear whether state officials were also giving in Tuesday’s press conference that month-out projection the decides how long a region must remain under the stricter orders.

The rate of new COVID-19 cases, too, is being used to anticipate demand for hospital beds – Southern California is seeing about 130 new positive tests each day for every 100,000 residents right now.

“We know that those cases are going to end up in the hospital, 10 to 12 days later, at a rate of about 12%,” Ghaly said.

The state’s four-tier, color-coded system has been less important to state health officials in recent weeks as most California counties remains in the strictest purple tier for “widespread” coronavirus risk.

Southern California entered the latest shutdown on Dec. 6 because adult ICU bed availability among the 11-county region’s hospitals fell below a 15% limit set by state health officials.

“You can certainly stretch many rubber bands pretty far as we are stretching many of our hospitals pretty far,” Ghaly said. “But we know that that stretch has a limit before it breaks.”

In Southern California, hospitals are running out of staff, are having to use all their rooms and are experiencing much longer than normal wait times in emergency rooms.

Hospitals that normally run independently of each other now are obligated to each other to absorb new patients and share resources, particularly if smaller facilities have to switch to an all-hands “crisis care” status, Ghaly said.

There are some signs that increases in COVID-19 cases statewide are leveling off, Ghaly said, but another wave is expected to hit hospitals in the next couple of weeks.

“We certainly anticipate that the middle of January is going to be a pretty difficult time in our hospitals, where the cases from this week and next week really start to stack on top of one another, impacting the emergency rooms, our hospital wards and our ICU spaces,” he said.

Southern California’s hospitals have been the state government’s biggest focus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday, noting that almost every hospital in Los Angeles County on Saturday diverted ambulances because they already had too many people awaiting beds.

A torrent of coronavirus patients at hospitals also burdens routine emergency room care, he said, meaning longer waits for other acute patients – people who have been in a car accident or have had a heart attack or stroke.

The governor said a new state team will be embedded in Los Angeles County to encourage “load leveling,” or shifting patients from overfilled hospitals to neighbors that still have room.

Some 612,000 more coronavirus vaccine doses are headed to California as state leaders seek to speed up their rollout and figure out who should get them next.

On Monday, Jan. 4, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state’s mass inoculation, which began Dec. 14, has powered up “like a flywheel,” and the pace should quicken in coming weeks.

By Sunday, about 454,000 doses had been administered, about a third of the nearly 1.3 million Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines the state has received so far.

“It’s gone too slowly, I know, for many of us. All of us, I think, we want to see 100% of what’s received immediately administered in people’s arms,” Newsom said. “As we move into January, we want things to accelerate.”

The state is preparing to add more distribution sites, he said, and authorize more medical professionals to give shots, such as dentists, pharmacy technicians and members of the National Guard.

California is in the first leg of its vaccination campaign – Phase 1A – which is exclusive to about 3 million frontline medical workers and residents of nursing and assisted living homes.

The next leg, Phase 1B, will be split in two: First up will be people age 75 and older and high-risk workers such as teachers, childcare workers and more emergency services personnel. Next will be people ages 65 to 74, prisoners, homeless and high-risk workers in transportation, industrial, commercial, residential and “critical” manufacturing sectors.

It is not yet clear when the next phase will begin.

Phase 1C is expected to include people age 50 and older, and people ages 16 to 64 with underlying medical conditions or a disability that increases their risk of a severe coronavirus case. The third phase also includes workers in sectors such as energy, water, defense, communications and government operations.

More Phase 1C details will be hammered out by the state’s Community Vaccine Advisory Committee on Wednesday, Newsom said.

To date, California has designated its hundreds of thousands of doses to local health departments, which have distributed most of them to health care providers. Administrators at hospitals and clinics have formed their own schedules to vaccinate doctors, nurses and other health care workers. First responders have also received early doses of the vaccine.

Technicians and nurses with pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens are tasked with vaccinating long-term care facility residents and staff.

State officials have said they expect the shots to be widely available to the general public by early summer.

One million vaccinations over the next 10 days.

That’s the working goal of one of California’s COVID-19 vaccination planning groups, which convened Wednesday, Jan. 6, and echoed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desire this week to speed up the state’s mass vaccination campaign.

California currently is in the first stage – Phase 1A – of the drive, which sent a first wave of shots to hospitals and pharmacies to inoculate frontline health care workers and long-term care residents.

Phase 1A kicked off in mid-December, but has been slow going as health providers confront the logistical dilemma of redeploying staff to inject other staff in the middle of a winter rush on hospitals. There are also health care workers opting out.

Of about 2 million Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna doses shipped to California so far, roughly 490,000 had been administered as of Tuesday, said Dr. Erica Pan, a California Department of Public Health epidemiologist and co-chair of the Community Vaccine Advisory Committee, which works with the Drafting Guidelines Workgroup to form the state’s coronavirus vaccination agenda.

“We have vaccinated a lot of people… but we do need to move faster,” Pan said. “Our goal is to administer another million in the next 10 days.”

To speed up the first leg of the race, dentists and other medical professionals are being added to the fold of personnel authorized to administer the shots. Local health departments have begun planning large-scale vaccination sites along the lines of coronavirus testing “super sites.”

It remained unclear exactly when public health officials would advise moving on to the next stage, Phase 1B, which is split into two levels.

Tier 1 would go first and includes people age 75 and older and workers at high risk of exposure, such as teachers and workers in childcare, emergency services and food and agriculture.

Second would be Tier 2, which includes people age 65 and older and workers in transportation and logistics, “critical” manufacturing and other sectors, as well as prisoners and homeless people.

Phase 1C would follow, and so far includes people age 50 and older, as well as those up to 49 years old with underlying medical conditions or a disability that could lead to a more severe case of COVID-19. A vaccine has not yet been authorized for children under age 16.

During the committee’s sixth virtual roundtable on Wednesday, talks ranged from how to equitably distribute the shot among more pandemic-vulnerable communities to public service announcement ideas for increasing vaccine acceptance.

“Vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations save lives, so we’ve got to get them out of the refrigerator – freezer – and into those arms,” said Dr. Oliver Brooks, co-chair of the campaign’s Drafting Guidelines Workgroup.

State officials on Tuesday, Jan. 26, launched a trial run of the new vaccine eligibility tool My Turn, which all Californians will eventually be able to use to check if they’re eligible for a coronavirus shot and be notified when it’s their turn.

Only healthcare workers and people age 65 and older in Los Angeles and San Diego counties can immediately book appointments during this pilot, but the program is expected to be expanded to all state residents “in coming weeks,” said Government Operations Agency Secretary Yolanda Richardson, who is heading California’s vaccine distribution and operations.

The goal is to standardize vaccine information and data across the state for both users and administrators, Richardson said Tuesday during a news conference. Across the state, mass vaccination pushes have been hindered by low supply, a lack of administrators and confusion among target groups, such as seniors.

“I want to make sure we can scale up so that when more vaccine is available, Californians can access that infrastructure,” Richardson said. “We understand that vaccine supply is limited, but we also need to address that the supply we have now needs to be administered as quickly as possible.”

“This is a pilot site,” says the myturn.ca.gov landing page; it is available in English and Spanish. “My Turn is where you can find out if it’s your turn to get vaccinated and schedule vaccination appointments. If it isn’t your turn yet, you can register to be notified when you become eligible.”

The tool is part of a broader push by state health leaders to better organize California’s piecemeal vaccination drive, which consists of public and private health systems, pharmacies, hospitals, community health clinics and pop up and mobile sites.

With My Turn, the array of administrators will have a streamlined way to report the administration of doses quickly, data the state relies on to inform decisions on which groups to focus on next, with a keen eye on getting shots into hard-hit and underserved communities.

“We want to make sure that nothing slows down the administration of vaccine other than the pace in which vaccine arrives in the state, and we’re going to do that by balancing safety, speed and equity while scaling up to meet the level of vaccine needed in the state,” Richardson said.

Statewide, administrators have tripled the pace of vaccine administration over the past month, from 40,000 to about 125,000 shots each weekday, said Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly.

Ghaly also noted Tuesday that exactly a year had passed since the state’s first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“There’s been a measurable loss in this last year, over 37,500 Californians have lost their lives,” he said. “It also has shaped a number of our families, our households, our communities in ways.”

Meanwhile, case rates, testing positivity and hospitalizations, three key pandemic tracking metrics, are trending down across the state, he said.

On Monday, California leaders lifted regional stay-at-home orders statewide, the strictest mandate since early in the pandemic in response to dwindling intensive care beds amid the end-of-year coronavirus surge.

Still, 99% of California residents live in counties that are in the most-restrictive purple tier of the state’s four-level pandemic tracking system, which governs what businesses and public places can open and how they can operate.

Southern California had been under the order since Dec. 6, when the adjusted adult ICU bed availability among the region’s hospitals fell below 15%.

The easing of rules surprised many who didn’t expect the ICU capacity outlook in Southern California – which stagnated at an adjusted 0% for weeks – to improve tremendously over the next month.

However, Department of Public Health officials on Monday said Southern California’s capacity is set to boost to 33.3% bed availability by Feb. 21, offering a glimpse at projection data that state leaders for weeks had used to decide whether the latest regional lockdowns should remain without publicly releasing the data.

If the state’s projections hold, Southern California, previously a region where open ICU beds were most scarce, will be better off than California as a whole, which is expected to have 30.3% ICU capacity in a month.

Southern California is also expected to beat the rest of the state in the average number of people each coronavirus-infected person will pass the virus onto – a metric called R-effective – according to Department of Public Health projections.

With reproduction rates, the number 1 is the line of scrimmage. A figure below 1 means the coronavirus is losing momentum and spreading more slowly while a figure above 1 means each infected person is spreading it to one or more people.

The 11-county Southern California region – which stretches from Mono to San Diego – by Feb. 21 will have a viral reproduction of 0.85, meaning for every person who is infected, they will pass it onto less than one other person on average. The rest of the state’s reproduction rate by then will be 0.88, the public health forecast showed.

After a statewide rise and fall in transmission over the summer, R-effective rose again in late October and fell sharply in late December, showing that the latest stay-at-home orders and collectively avoiding holiday gatherings worked, Ghaly said Tuesday.

“We want to see it go even lower if we can,” he said.

A San Clemente man caught a new and seemingly more contagious variant of COVID-19, Orange County’s first known case of the so-called U.K. strain and probably not the last, public health officials said Monday, Feb. 8.

The 21-year-old man tested positive for the variant on Jan. 26, Dr. Clayton Chau, the OC Health Care Agency director and county health officer, wrote Monday in a memo to the Board of Supervisors.

Related: Mask Q&:A: How to protect against the coronavirus

“His symptoms have now resolved,” Chau wrote. “He has no history of international travel. He is not part of a larger outbreak. We are trying to get his close contacts tested to see if they have evidence of infection.”

California’s Department of Public Health reported the case to the county health agency over the weekend, Chau said.

State health department staff said Monday additional details could not be made public to protect the patient’s privacy.

The variant – known as B.1.1.7 – was first discovered in the United Kingdom in September and is quickly spreading around the world. It is one of a few COVID-19 mutations that scientists are scrambling to learn more about, including whether they cause more severe illness than the original coronavirus strain that started the pandemic.

“Viruses constantly change through mutation, and new variants of a virus are expected to occur over time. Sometimes new variants emerge and disappear. Other times, new variants emerge and persist,” Chau wrote.

Because the man contracted the new strain without traveling abroad, it’s likely there are other U.K. variant cases in Orange County that have not yet been identified, said Dr. Matt Zahn, deputy county health officer and medical director of Public Health Services’ Communicable Disease Control Division.

But to date, no other cases have been found, Zahn said.

The U.K. strain was first spotted in the U.S. in late December; now, there are 153 known cases in California, about 138 of which were in San Diego County, Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a news conference Monday. It’s also surfaced in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.

Another 1,203 Californians have contracted versions of another strain, called the West Coast variant, Newsom said.

On paper, 54-year-old David Doss of Huntington Beach has been a Republican since he was 18, when he first registered to vote and joined the GOP as a way to push back against his liberal parents.

“My rebellious stage was being a Republican,” Doss said with a chuckle.

Since then he’s voted for Republicans, Democrats, independents and third-party candidates whose values aligned with his own. He always felt he leaned a bit more on the liberal side, just as his parents had hoped, but he never bothered to change his voter registration.

Then the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot happened.

“I thought (the attack on the Capitol) was deplorable and I didn’t think enough Republicans shunned it as well as they should have,” he said.

“I just couldn’t support anybody that was supporting that.”

So on Jan. 7, Doss was one of 73 Orange County residents who changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat. That same day, 135 Republicans switched to No Party Preference, 72 became American Independents and 18 became Libertarians.

From Jan. 6 roughly through the end of the month, more than 14,000 Republicans in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties changed their voter registration away from the GOP, according to a Southern California News Group analysis of voter data from California’s Secretary of State.

At the same time, nearly 9,000 Democrats and 18,000 voters with no party preference in Southern California also switched their affiliations.

Many of the people leaving the GOP, like Doss, switched out of disgust over the riot. But others left because, in their view, it wasn’t doing enough to fight for President Donald Trump and contest what they believe to be a stolen election or stand up to Democrats.

The GOP has “too many (Republicans in name only) that are not promoting America first,” said Marvin Foster, 75, of Rancho Cucamonga, who like many ex-Republican voters is now unaffiliated with any party.

Statewide, more than 33,000 Californian GOP voters have changed their party affiliations since Jan. 6. It’s a nationwide trend as well. More than 140,000 Republicans in 25 states, including 12,000 in Pennsylvania and 10,000 in Arizona, left the party in January, The New York Times reported.

What’s more, regional data suggests the reregistration trend has resulted in a net loss for the GOP and a gain for Democrats.

Though party affiliation data for Los Angeles County isn’t available for the period in question, data from Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties show the Republican Party shrunk a bit. In Orange County the drop was about 5,300 GOP voters, while Riverside lost about 2,300 and San Bernardino lost about 900.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party grew regionally in the three counties where data was available. In Orange County, Democrats picked up about 900 voters, overall, while the jump in Riverside was a bit more than 1,000 and in San Bernardino it was about 1,900.

Still, some GOP leaders note that the number of people leaving their party in the past month is just a sliver over the overall voting population in Southern California. Any loss for the GOP might not be permanent or big enough to change many elections.

As of October 2020, the Democratic Party had the most registered voters — 10.2 million — California, followed by the GOP with 5.3 million, Secretary of State figures show. Republicans reclaimed second place last October after falling behind no-party-preference voters in 2018, while Democrats gained about 1.4 million voters and unaffiliated voters’ ranks grew by about 572,000 between October 2016 and October 2020.

Hector Barajas, a California GOP spokesman, referred to state figures showing the party gained up to 670,000 voters in the two years since the election of state GOP Chairman Jessica Millan Patterson. (During that period, Democrats in California posted a net gain of about 1.6 million registered voters.)

Barajas also challenged the notion that national events like the Capitol riot will stunt the momentum of a state GOP that in November won four California House seats that had been held by Democrats. He said elected Republicans have focused on a range of issues — poverty, taxes, coronavirus vaccine rollout and coronavirus relief fraud — that will motivate GOP voters to register and cast ballots.

But Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, disagreed, suggesting the riot is a key problem for the GOP.

Data does suggest the riot was an issue for some GOP voters in Orange County. While the county is home to just over 11% of the state’s registered Republicans, it was responsible for 15% of the statewide GOP losses from Jan. 6 through Jan. 28, even as Democrats picked up new voters in the county.

“I think that the number shows us that the insurrection and what former President Trump did that led to Jan. 6 really disgusted Americans across party lines,” Briceño said.

Does GOP need Trump?

Randi Berger, who organized pro-Trump rallies across L.A., recently switched from the GOP to the American Independent Party. She said Jan. 6 played no role in her decision.

Instead, Berger, who is now affiliated with the ultra-conservative American Independent Party, said the GOP and Democratic Party are becoming too similar and too focused on preserving their party and money.

Whatever Trump does post-presidency, he has a following of at least 74 million voters, she said. “Trump didn’t need the GOP. It needed him.”

Former GOP-registered voter Nancy Leo, 64, of Redlands said Jan. 6 did factor into her decision to become a no-party-preference voter, but it’s because Congress “decided to certify the election results … despite all of the questionable voting activity that took place in the swing states. The Republicans that tried to object were silenced and censored.”

Assemblyman Chad Mayes, from Rancho Mirage, once was a GOP leader in Sacramento, but switched to NPP in 2019 because he was dissatisfied with Trump.

He said that prior to Jan. 6 he would hear from Republicans who held out hope that with Trump heading out of the White House the party would again emphasize a more traditional vision of conservatism. But the assault on the Capitol, Mayes added, “definitely” prompted some people to leave the GOP.

“After January 6, that visual was there. People saw that. And people thought ‘Oh my God, the party is not going back to what it was,’” said Mayes, whose district includes parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“January 6 was a demarcation point for many people who realized that the Republican Party has fundamentally changed.”

George “Duf” Sundheim, a former state GOP chairman who ran for U.S. Senate in 2016, said he’s very concerned about the party’s future in California.

“I don’t know where it’s headed, but I think it’s really important that we stand by core principles and not look at short-term tactical advantage,” he said. “We need to look at a future after the Trump presidency. There were certain things he did that were really good. But there are certain things that were totally unacceptable.”

“To say our future is tied to Mr. Trump,” Sundheim added, “is an anchor around our neck.”

The GOP, Sundheim said, collectively needs to bear down on issues. “As long as we focus on personalities — that the other guys are the bad guys — we’re not going to be worthy of leadership.”

Does voter exodus matter?

Paul Mitchell, who tracks voter behavior for the Sacramento-based consulting firm Political Data Inc., said the dip in GOP registration since Jan. 6 is being a bit overplayed.

“Looked at in isolation, I think you can say, ‘Oh my gosh, there are all these Republicans who are reregistering.’ That fits with our narrative of what’s happening with the world,” he said.

“But when you dig into the data, it’s very small numbers.”

It’s normal for partisan registration to dip following an election, Mitchell noted, with voters who are re-registering now perhaps no longer feeling the same “partisan pangs” they did during the heat of the election.

Factoring in that trend, Mitchell said his firm’s calculations showed that of the 33,000 Republicans statewide who changed party affiliation in the weeks following the Jan. 6 attack, only about 18,000 more have left the party than what would have been expected given the trends heading into that day.

That 18,000 isn’t nothing considering how close some races were in November. But Mitchell noted it’s also less than four tenths of 1% of the state’s 5.3 million registered Republicans.

It is unusual that Democrats have gained voters in local counties in recent weeks, when the typical pattern is for people to switch to NPP during off-election years. Still, Mitchell said the bumps are small in context.

It’s not unheard of for voter registration to swing based on isolated incidents, according to Mitchell. He recalled spikes in online registration for both major parties following the 2016 presidential debates, for example. This time around, he attributes roughly 70% of the recent GOP attrition to the natural trend and maybe 30% to the Capitol siege.

It will take more time to see if recent events will have a more serious impact on GOP registration, Mitchell said. That’s because while changing party registration in California is as simple as going onto the Secretary of State’s website and answering a few questions, most people don’t immediately take that step even when something happens that might sway their political views.

“There’s this strict relationship people want to draw between small changes in registration and election outcomes,” Mitchell said. “But it’s not a one-to-one relationship.”

State officials announced Friday, Feb. 12, that in one month, administrators can begin coronavirus vaccinations for anyone younger than 65 with a medical condition that increases their chances of having a deadly case of COVID-19.

Starting March 15, health care providers across California may vaccinate people ages 16 to 64 who are at highest risk if they catch the coronavirus, including people with cancer, chronic lung disease and various heart maladies.

Also included are pregnant women, people with Down syndrome and people who are severely obese, have Type 2 diabetes or have had an organ transplant, among other conditions.

“We recognize that certain individuals across many of the different categories, whether they’re work or aged based, have additional risk factors, based on various disabilities (and) various conditions,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said to reporters Friday afternoon.

The announcement came one turbulent month after public health departments and private networks in Southern California broadened vaccination campaigns to include seniors age 65 amid short supplies and huge demand.

Adding people ages 16 to 64 with health conditions will heap up to 6 million more eligible people on top of the millions of seniors and health care workers who can book appointments for shots today, Ghaly said.

“We are still very much dealing with the scarcity of vaccines,” he said.

But while the supply outlook is murky, Ghaly said administrators are now clear to get more doses out of vaccine vials already in the state. Those on the frontlines administering shots can now stretch Pfizer vials out into six doses instead of five, and Moderna vials can now yield 11 doses instead of 10.

“The hope is that supplies increase and that we work on our communication and engagement to make sure individuals feel comfortable and secure getting vaccinated, and that all comes together as soon as possible,” Ghaly said.

Doses being administered by Los Angeles health officials ran out earlier than expected this week, forcing the closures of five mass vaccination sites.

Officials in Orange County, meanwhile, said Tuesday they would continue to focus their efforts on seniors and wait another two weeks, at least, before offering the shots to educators, food services workers and others who are next up to get them.

As of Feb. 12, there have been 5.5 million doses of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots administered statewide, according to the Department of Public Health, which notes the figures “do not represent true day-to-day change as reporting may be delayed.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that just under 8 million doses have been delivered to California, and nearly 8.2 million doses have been shipped.

Disneyland has unveiled long-term plans for theme park, retail and parking expansion as the Anaheim theme park prepares to work with the city to reimagine what the resort district will look like over the next couple decades.

DisneylandForward is Disney’s effort to work with the city to grow the Disneyland resort, update the blueprint for the resort district and propel Anaheim’s economic rebound following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disney will be asking the city over the next weeks and months for more flexibility in how it develops company land planned for specific uses in the 1990s to be able to add a mix of theme park, hotel, retail, dining and entertainment on the eastern and western edges of the Disneyland resort. The overall footprint of the resort area would not increase in size.

Jeanette Lomboy, Disneyland portfolio executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, said during a media briefing on Thursday, March 25 that the DisneylandForward plan includes what could be possible in the future at the Disneyland resort with more flexibility and approvals from the city.

“Because of the current rigid district structure, we just need more flexibility,” Lomboy said. “We’re excited about the possibilities and ready to dream. Believe me, we have no shortage of ideas, content or stories to tell or build.”

The Immersive Theme Park west-side expansion envisions a theme park on the Downtown Disney and Lilo and Stitch parking lots woven amid the Disneyland Hotel and Paradise Pier Hotel.

Disney officials described the west-side site bounded by Katella Avenue, Walnut Street, Magic Way and Disneyland Drive as more of a theme park expansion than a new “third gate.”

Concept art of the west-side site shows a central mountain surrounded by water with buildings interspersed on the south end of the property. A mountain ridge to the west separates the theme park from nearby neighborhoods.

The west-side site links up with Downtown Disney near the unused AMC Theater and ESPN Zone.

Concept art of the northern end of the west-side site includes an Autopia-like car course and a Dumbo-like spinning ride.

The Disney Entertainment Destination east-side expansion would bring together theme park experiences, hotels, retail, dining and entertainment on the Toy Story parking lot next to the Anaheim Convention Center.

The east-side site on the 56-acre Fujishige strawberry-farm-turned-Disney-parking-lot has long been discussed as a possible “third gate” for future theme park expansion.

Concept art of the east-side retail area features a central lagoon surrounded by shops and a low-rise hotel with a parking structure near the corner of Katella Avenue and Haster Street.

“What we do know today is that guests need and want more,” Lomboy said. “In order to give guests what they want, we need more flexibility here in Anaheim. Guests are demanding immersive integrated experiences that are not singular in their uses. We no longer think of uses as separate. Retail, dining, entertainment, theme parks and hotels are all part of the same experiences in the same place. And we need the space in our lands to create story-rich environments.”

The DisneylandForward plan also includes possible new parking along Disney Way.

However, the company’s ambitions will need to be signed off by Anaheim leaders after a back-and-forth planning process that’s expected to last two years before final decisions are made.

Anaheim spokesman Mike Lyster said the city at this point is receptive to updating the zoning around the Disneyland resort and the surrounding tourist district around Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue. Rezoning in the 1990s cleared a path for the construction of Disney California Adventure, Downtown Disney and the massive Mickey & Friends Parking Structure.

But restricting land to single uses is seen as outdated as urban planners consider how tourists in 2021 want to be immersed in their destination.

“The easiest way to think about it is we would work with them to look at flexibility, to look at how sites are used under that planning,” Lyster said. “Right now, under the plan, you might have an area designated as ‘hotel,’ you might have another designated as ‘entertainment.’”

Going forward, Disney is looking for “mixed-use” flexibility, Lyster said. “On the same parcel, you’d have a hotel and entertainment, as opposed to two different parcels.”

For example, Disney could build up it’s Toy Story parking lot on Katella Avenue — which is currently being used as a mass coronavirus vaccination site — into a hotel, for which the land is already zoned.

“But with more flexible planning, it could perhaps also house entertainment uses,” which could add sales taxes to future revenue, Lyster said.

While a section of Disneyland’s back lot was recently transformed for the 2019 opening of a new land, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the company has hit roadblocks for other park-adjacent projects.

In 2017, plans for a seven-story parking structure, transportation hub and pedestrian crossing over Harbor Boulevard linking them to the theme parks were scrapped after nearby hotels and restaurants protested the potential loss of foot traffic and the city’s receptiveness to a footbridge was in question.

Disney pivoted its focus to building a luxury hotel in Downtown Disney, but the hotel was shelved the following year amid an impasse with the city on tax incentives.

The trials of the past pandemic year and the effect on the city’s tourism bloc aren’t lost on the City Council, which voted Tuesday to shore up a $108 million deficit by borrowing up to $210 million.

“In the past year, we have seen what the Disneyland Resort means to Anaheim’s economy and the role it plays in helping us provide vital public services for our residents, neighborhoods and businesses,” Mayor Harry Sidhu said in a statement.

“I welcome fresh thinking about how the Disneyland Resort evolves and how we best maximize this resource for our city,” Sidhu said.

Such rethinking is apparent in plans to rebuild areas around Angel Stadium and the Honda Center into mixed-use blocks of apartments, offices, shops, restaurants and other entertainment over the next decade.

“We see all three complimenting each other,” Lyster said. “We see it as our path to economic recovery in years to come.”

The DisneylandForward presentation included concept art from Disney theme park projects around the globe that provide a “flavor” of what future expansion could look like at the Disneyland resort. The projects presented by Lomboy included the Tangled, Frozen and Peter Pan themed lands coming to Tokyo Disneyland in Japan, the Zootopia themed land, Disneytown retail district and the Tron roller coaster at Shanghai Disneyland in China and Toy Story Land and Disney Springs shopping district at Walt Disney World in Florida.

“We’re not announcing anything specific today as part of DisneylandForward,” Lomboy said. “These kinds of projects should give you a flavor of the types of industry-defining integrated experiences and story-rich lands that we want to bring to Anaheim.”

Disneyland has “only dipped into less than half” of the millions of square feet of theme park and hotel space that has already been approved for the resort district, according to Disney officials.

The DisneylandForward conceptual development plan stays within Disney’s existing 500-acre property in Anaheim with no physical expansion or additional acreage.

“We’re not changing the size of the toast, we’re just spreading the peanut butter around,” according to a Disney official.

Four months after coronavirus vaccinations began in California, eligibility expanded Thursday, April 15, to everyone in the state age 16 and over, signaling that future supplies can be counted on over coming weeks get shots into the arms of everyone in the state who wants one.

Vaccinators across the state to date have administered some 24 million doses, far outpacing other states and many other countries, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday at a Bay Area clinic, and while eligibility has opened to its widest point, half the eligible population in California has already received at least one dose.

“April 15 in 2021 in the state of California is not ‘Tax Day,’ it’s ‘Vax Day,’” Newsom said.

“While it is true that we had a temporary setback with one of the approved vaccines; (Johnson & Johnson shots) represent just 4% of our weekly dose administration,” he said, adding that Pfizer and Moderna doses will be able to make up that difference in the near term.

The only constraint in administering more shots is manufactured supply, Newsom said.

“We are looking forward to getting more vaccines in more arms for one fundamental reason: it saves lives,” Newsom said.

“These vaccines are safe, these vaccines are effective, these vaccines will get our kids safely back, in person, in school. These vaccines will quickly and safely get our economy moving again in a sustainable way.”

State leaders expect to lift all pandemic-induced closures, social distancing rules and capacity limits at businesses and public places across California starting June 15, though the state’s mask mandate will stay in place as a precaution.

Various groups were prioritized in various phases of the rollout, starting with frontline health care workers and the elderly, then jumping through workers in education and other frontline sectors and younger people with health conditions that could lead to a serious or fatal case of COVID-19.

Some local health agencies, depending on supplies, offered vaccines to certain groups ahead of state guidance.

Manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna currently are testing vaccines for children under age 16, but a shot has not yet been approved by federal regulators.

“We are making progress, we are going to defeat this disease, we are going to end this pandemic,” Newsom said. “There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel, but we still have more work to do.”

Four months after coronavirus vaccinations began in California, eligibility expanded Thursday, April 15, to everyone in the state age 16 and over, signaling that future supplies can be counted on over coming weeks get shots into the arms of everyone in the state who wants one.

Anyone living or working in L.A. County 16 and older can schedule vaccination appointments on the MyTurn website. Residents 16 and 17 can only receive the Pfizer vaccine, according to county officials, and should sign up at a site that offers this vaccine. Minors must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Vaccinators across the state to date have administered some 24 million doses, far outpacing other states and many other countries, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday at a Bay Area clinic, and while eligibility has opened to its widest point, half the eligible population in California has already received at least one dose.

“April 15 in 2021 in the state of California is not ‘Tax Day,’ it’s ‘Vax Day,’” Newsom said.

“While it is true that we had a temporary setback with one of the approved vaccines; (Johnson & Johnson shots) represent just 4% of our weekly dose administration,” he said, adding that Pfizer and Moderna doses will be able to make up that difference in the near term.

The only constraint in administering more shots is manufactured supply, Newsom said.

“We are looking forward to getting more vaccines in more arms for one fundamental reason: it saves lives,” Newsom said.

“These vaccines are safe, these vaccines are effective, these vaccines will get our kids safely back, in person, in school. These vaccines will quickly and safely get our economy moving again in a sustainable way.”

In L.A. County, there are an estimated 5 million people in the newly eligible group aged 16-49, but about 1.5 million of them have already received at least one shot because they were eligible in other categories, according to Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

The expansion means getting an appointment for a vaccination could get tougher as those millions of newly eligible people try to get shots. As they have with every major expansion of eligibility, health officials urged people to be patient as they negotiation the appointment system.

To ensure those who were already eligible and most vulnerable to illness from the coronavirus, the county is striving to allocate more than 70% of this week’s doses to vaccine providers located or administering doses in the hardest hit communities.

“We have reached a good place and time when every resident or worker 16 years old and older is eligible to get vaccinated,” public health director Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday. “Given additional re-openings and increased activities where large numbers of people are intermingling, vaccines provide very powerful protection that help us reduce community transmission, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.”

“Every time we’ve expanded eligibility we have to be very mindful of making sure that we remain committed to increasing capability and accessibility of the vaccine in hardest hit communities,” Ferrer said.

The county has stepped up its efforts to get vaccinations to people experiencing homeless ness. There are now 121 providers inoculating homeless people, Ferrer said, twice as many as last week.

More than 13,600 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to homeless people so far, she added, and at least 1,907 were second doses.

Coronavirus cases among people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County is down to 117 this week, dropping from the peak of 672 weekly cases health officials reported in late December during the winter surge, public health officials reported Thursday, April 15.

This week’s count includes 58 cases from previous weeks that were newly identified as cases associated with people experiencing homelessness.

There are a total of 6,994 cases reported for people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County, 205 of whom have died. Of those who lost their lives, 93 people were sheltered, 67 were unsheltered and the shelter status is unknown for the remaining 45 people.

Overall, Public Health officials reported 23 new deaths and 613 new cases of COVID-19 in the county Thursday, bringing the total lives lost to 23,569, and overall positive cases to 1,227,514.

According to a state dashboard, there are 512 people hospitalized with the disease in the county, down by six from the previous day, with 123 in intensive care.

Among cities operating their own health departments: Pasadena’s four new cases raised its total to 11,186; its death toll increased by one, to 340. Three new fatalities in Long Beach raised its death toll to 926; 19 cases increased the city’s total to 52,582.

Also Thursday, the county launched its Orange Tier reopenings, allowing indoor seated live events and performances, as well as private events such as meetings, conferences and receptions. Audiences will be limited and masks, social distancing and other safety requirements will be in place.

State leaders expect to lift all pandemic-induced closures, social distancing rules and capacity limits at businesses and public places across California starting June 15, though the state’s mask mandate will stay in place as a precaution.