For a second year, Carbon Health clinics have been filled to overcapacity during a holiday season with those sick from or concerned about yet another COVID surge. Much progress has been made, but we find ourselves facing a stubborn set of challenges that make it appear sometimes like we have travelled back in time to late 2020 or early 2021. The best civic-minded efforts and resourcefulness of public health officials, of private companies like Carbon Health and others, and of tens of millions of people around the world to beat back COVID are being matched by a virus that is proving to be resilient. Yet, as I reflect on that whirlwind experience, the hope and optimism that COVID vaccines heralded for the better part of the past year is, of course, tempered in the current moment by the persistent and, unfortunately, surging reality of the ongoing pandemic. But it was the right thing to do for the community, and it will pay dividends for Carbon Health in many ways for months and years to come. The City of Los Angeles vaccination project was not the most profitable thing we could have done with our time and resources. In so doing, we increased exponentially the awareness of Carbon Health in the region and beyond as well as advanced our company’s mission of delivering an accessible, easy-to-use, technology-forward experience to a broad cross-section of health care consumers. Ultimately, we delivered over 1.5 million vaccine shots to the people of Southern California and catalyzed the region’s progress toward one of the highest vaccination rates of any large city in the world. One of our core values as a company is to “assume karma exists,” and this is the spirit in which we marshaled resources from every corner of our company in what was truly a whole company undertaking. Nevertheless, we jumped into the effort with both feet. And we really had no idea what the revenue model would even be for the project. We were concerned from a cash perspective about the working capital drain that the program might demand of us. Neither party knew exactly how the details of the arrangement would play out. One year ago this week, barely one week after we first met with Los Angeles city officials, we opened and began operating in partnership with CORE and LAFD, the largest mass COVID vaccination site in the country at Dodger Stadium on behalf of the City of Los Angeles, which was seeing 1,500+ COVID-related deaths per week at the time. As we turn the page to 2022, I find myself thinking a lot about where Carbon Health was a year ago, where we are today, and the road that we have travelled as a company, as a nation and as a global community during the past year.
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