Wonderful. (NOT) I just saw a headline that the Supreme Court has ruled against letting the government require that employees at large companies be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. I can't say that this surprises me; it definitely disappoints me. As might be expected the three most liberal justices dissented. I was pleased, though, that the Court is allowing a vaccine mandate for health care workers to remain in effect. I cannot see how they could have killed that mandate. If there is any single group of people who should be vaccinated, it is health care workers. Beyond getting covid themselves, they could spread it to family, friends, neighbors, and so on. What is that part of the oath doctors take? First, do no harm?
In terms of employee vaccine mandates, United Airlines reports that some 3,000 employees recently tested positive, but no vaccinated employees have been hospitalized. Before the company required employees be vaccinated, more than one employee per week was dying of covid. That sounds to me like pretty good evidence in favor of company mandates, at least for companies that want to keep an intact work force.
Knock me over with a feather, but our former president has endorsed booster shots and said that politicians who refuse to say if they have gotten one are "gutless." Before we read too much into that, it is likely that the comment was directed at Florida's governor who has refused to disclose his booster status and who is looking like a possible contender against the former president to run in 2024.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on education at all levels. At the higher education level, total undergraduate enrollment dropped 3.1 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021. Going back a year, the total decline since fall 2019 is 6.6 percent, or 1,205,600 students. Public two-year colleges often known as community colleges have been hit the hardest. Enrollment there is down 13.2 percent or about 706,000 students since fall 2019. The number of students seeking associate degrees at four-year schools also fell as did the number of students aged 24 and older. One bright spot is that while enrollment of first-year students is 9.2 percent lower in fall 2021 than fall 2019, the difference between fall 2020 and fall 2021 was actually in the positive direction, up about 0.4 percent or about 8,000 students.
The Australian Open tennis tournament is responding to Omicron by capping spectators at 50 percent capacity for any match that has yet to sell 50 percent of the seats. Novak Djokovic, the top seed, was included in the draw of matches but could still be deported. It's going to be an interesting weekend leading up to the tournament's start on Monday.
1 comment:
I had to search out the article I read earlier this week that split the number of covid cases in hospital between those there for treatment for covid and those there for something else. I think I've previously used the example of someone who falls off their roof, breaks a leg but becomes a covid admission after testing at the hospital. Sometimes the definition isn't clear and what we think it means isn't actually what is being reported. I could digress here into what we think is meant by a "new hospital" and I'm pretty sure that what the general public thought that election promise meant was not how it was later defined. The BBC article which includes our split of hospitalisations with covid or for covid is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59862568
My laptop has gone away to university for the week, replaced by a previous model that has all the keys located about one key to the left. It has been a week of much backspacing which has been quite frustrating because that's where the number lock key sits.
Post a Comment