At a recent town hall meeting for a local Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), I updated our residents on the state of the COVID pandemic in our community. Compared to the prior 2 years, we are experiencing much less serious medical illness and the deaths in 2022 were about one-tenth of what we experienced in the prior 2 years. However, the risk of dying from COVID is still about 10 times higher than that for influenza and nearly 9 in 10 COVID deaths have occurred in those over 65 years of age. The uptake of the new bivalent booster has been disappointingly slow with only 15.4% of the eligible USA population vaccinated. As of January 9, this booster uptake in CA has been 22.7%, which is higher in elders, but is still low. In Sonoma County, of those over 65, 53% are boosted, but this drops to 29% of the 50-64 y/o and further drops to 8-11% for those in the 6-34 y/o age ranges.