Author Archives: cleek

This Is The Way

Make the free-riders pay.

People who choose not to get vaccinated against the coronavirus face greater odds of getting seriously ill and hospitalized – a decision that could risk not just their health, but their finances as employers mandate vaccination and insurance companies look at ways to pass on the costs of treatment.

More than 90% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. And because 41% of eligible Americans have not yet been fully immunized against the virus, some are pushing a new tactic – making the unvaccinated pay a larger share of their medical bills.

Teachers Learned a Hard Lesson

Four Florida teachers working in the same school district died of COVID-19 within one day of each other this week. “Within a 24-hour span, we had an assistant teacher pass away, a teacher at her school pass away, an elementary teacher pass away, and another teacher at a high school,” Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco told CBS. Fusco said three of the teachers were unvaccinated and that the vaccination status of the fourth was unknown.

Congrats to My SiL

On book publishing day !

With a foreword from Michelle Obama, of all people, she doesn't really need the ones of eyeballs I can send her way. But it's the thought that counts, right?

Aye Aye

Here's me doing "Aye Aye".

'Cause you're my grub. You're the apple of my aye aye's eye.

It's Just The Flu

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918.

It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic.

COVID deaths in US: 631,309.

Sorry

Nearly all of the world’s emperor penguin colonies may be pushed to the brink of extinction by 2100, a new study has found, as the United States moves to list them as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

If climate change continues at its current rate, more than 98 percent of emperor penguin colonies are expected to become quasi-extinct by the turn of the century, a group of global researchers wrote in the journal Global Change Biology on Tuesday. The scientists’ near-term predictions were equally grim: They estimated at least two-thirds of colonies would be quasi-extinct by 2050.

(Quasi-extinction refers to a population being doomed for extinction even if some members of the species remain alive.)