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- Written by: Lake County News reports
Mendocino College graduates enjoyed a free dinner and virtual commencement ceremony this year.
In April, a survey was sent to all graduating students to gather input about how best to celebrate their accomplishments this year. The response from the majority of students was that they preferred a virtual ceremony.
“This past year has forever changed our world. Despite all the adversities, our graduates exemplified the resiliency the world needs,” said Mendocino College Superintendent/President Tim Karas. “Our graduates are strong and will make the world a better place for everyone. We are very proud of our graduates! They will forever be an alumnus of Mendocino College and part of our family.”
Thanks to the Mendocino College Foundation, students were given a $50 dinner voucher to be used at a select group of participating local restaurants throughout the district. This allowed students to celebrate the actual day of graduation with a meal at home with their families while at the same time supporting local restaurants.
There will also be a listing of all 2021 graduates in a special magazine that will be circulated in both Lake and Mendocino counties.
Amy Adams, who received two AS degrees, one in business management and the other in business accounting, said, “Although I was sad not to be able to walk the stage for my very first time, I felt the college did their best to celebrate my accomplishments, even in the midst of a pandemic. To top it off, they provided a graduation dinner in partnership with various local vendors. I chose Taqueria Bravo in Willits, which was delicious and the manager was so sweet and congratulated me on my graduation.”
“The foundation is honored to provide financial support towards this year’s commencement activities. Now more than ever, it’s important that we sufficiently honor and recognize our 2021 Mendocino College graduates,” said Mendocino College Foundation Board President Tom Dow.
Mendocino College hopes to have a traditional in person commencement ceremony next year and will invite all 2020 and 2021 graduates to participate if they wish.
The recording of the 2021 virtual commencement ceremony can be viewed above.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The following dogs are ready for adoption or foster. The newest dog is listed at the beginning of the list.
‘Princess’
Is a female American pit bull terrier mix with a short fawn and white coat.
She is dog No. 4840.
“Bear” is a male American Staffordshire terrier mix with a short brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 3476.
‘Cleo’
“Cleo” is a female Doberman pinscher mix with a short gray coat who is new to the shelter.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 4865.
‘Dusty’
“Dusty” is a male American Pit Bull Terrier with a tan and white coat.
He is dog No. 4750.
‘Sassy’
“Sassy” is a female Labrador retriever and pit bull mix with a short black with white markings.
She is house-trained.
She is dog No. 4602.
‘Toby’
“Toby” is a friendly senior male boxer mix.
He has a short tan and white coat.
Toby is house trained and neutered.
He is dog No. 4389.
Call the Clearlake Animal Control shelter at 707-273-9440, or email
Visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom selected the first 15 lucky Californians to be awarded $50,000 for doing their part in getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
The $750,000 awarded in Friday’s randomized drawing is part of California’s new $116.5 million Vax for the Win program — the largest vaccine incentive program in the nation — which includes $50 incentive cards to newly vaccinated residents and cash prize drawings for all who have received at least one dose.
This historic program is designed to motivate Californians to get vaccinated leading up to the state’s reopening on June 15.
"California has made incredible progress in the fight against COVID-19, with the lowest case rates in the entire country and millions more vaccines administered than any other state. But we aren't stopping there, we're doing everything it takes to get Californians vaccinated as we approach June 15 to help us safely reopen and bring the state roaring back,” said Gov. Newsom.
Since Vax for the Win launched, roughly a million vaccine doses have been recorded, including roughly 350,000 Californians newly starting their vaccination process.
In total, California has administered more than 38 million vaccines, ranked No. 8 in the world.
California has administered 15.4 million more doses than any other state and more than 70 percent of the adult population has received at least one dose.
“We are making another push to get more Californians vaccinated against COVID-19,” said Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, CDPH director and state Public Health officer. “With more than 70 percent of adults having already received at least one dose, the Vax for the Win program is the creative approach we need to make that final push for those who remain unvaccinated.”
More than 21 million Californians aged 12 and older are at least partially vaccinated and automatically entered to win in the cash prize drawings.
The second $50,000 drawing will take place on Friday, June 11, when an additional 15 Californians will be selected.
On June 15, when California safely reopens, 10 winners will be selected to receive $1.5 million each — adding up to a total of $15 million in cash prizes.
On top of that, the two million newly-vaccinated Californians who get their dose since Vax for the Win launched will be eligible to receive $50 prepaid and grocery cards.
Winners from Friday’s drawing live throughout the state in the following counties: Mendocino, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Alameda, San Diego, San Francisco, Orange and San Luis Obispo.
They start being notified directly by the California Department of Public Health within hours of the drawing and over the next four days by telephone, text, email or other contact information associated with the person’s record in the state’s vaccine registry.
To protect their privacy, all winners will have the option to accept their cash prize while remaining anonymous or decline it altogether.
Winners must complete their vaccination in order to claim their prize. If someone under 18 wins, the cash will be put in a savings account for them until they turn 18.
For more information about Vax for the Win, visit https://covid19.ca.gov/vax-for-the-win.
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- Written by: Karen Levy, University of Washington
Kill every human on the planet.
This is the first assignment I give students in my public health classes, filled with do-gooders passionate about saving the world. Their homework is to play a game called Plague, in which they pretend to be pathogens bent on infecting everyone on the globe before humans can develop a cure or a vaccine.
Why this assignment? Because as a professor of infectious disease epidemiology, I aim to teach students to think like pathogens so they can learn how to control them.
With COVID-19, thinking like a pathogen leads to an inevitable conclusion: Getting the vaccine out to everyone in the world as quickly as possible is not just an ethical imperative, but also a selfish one.
Passing on genetic material a key goal
While many wealthy countries soon will offer vaccines to their entire populations, people in poorer countries might have to wait years for their shots. About half of U.S. residents are now at least partially vaccinated. Many other countries have yet to reach 1% vaccination coverage.
In the interim, SARS-CoV-2 will take advantage of this opening.
In reality, pathogens don’t actually want to kill all of their human hosts, because they would eventually have nowhere to live. Their goal is to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. They will do what they can to answer their evolutionary call.
A virus to-do list
Of course, viruses and bacteria don’t have brains so they don’t “think,” per se. But like all life forms, these particular living creatures are trying to maximize their chances of reproducing and having their offspring survive and reproduce.
As a single virus particle, you have two key items on the to-do list. First, you need a place to propagate. You need to reproduce yourself in large numbers, to increase the chances that one of your kids will do the right thing and provide you with some grandchildren. As a virus you are very good at this bit. No need to visit Tinder and find the perfect match, as you reproduce asexually. Instead you use the cellular machinery of your host – the human you infect – to reproduce yourself.
Second, you need a way to get from your current host to the next host that you will infect, otherwise known as transmission. For that you need both a portal of exit – the way to get out of your current host – and a portal of entry – the way to get into your next host. You need a susceptible host. And you need a way to travel to your next host.
Susceptible hosts? That was easy for SARS-CoV-2 when it first came on the scene. Because it was a novel pathogen, the entire global population was susceptible. No humans had full immunity to this particular virus from previous exposure, because it didn’t exist in human populations before 2019. Now, with each person who gets exposed or vaccinated, the number of susceptible hosts dwindles.
For a portal of exit, SARS-CoV-2 has a few options – mostly exhalation through breathing, but also through pooping and expelling other bodily fluids. For a portal of entry it has inhalation – the new host breathes it in – and to a lesser extent ingestion – the new host consumes it orally.
This means that transmission of this virus is relatively easy, involving an activity that people of all ages do all day: breathing. Other viruses require more specific activities or conditions, such as sexual intercourse or needle-sharing for HIV, or being bitten by a particular species of mosquito for Zika.
SARS-CoV-2 is one smart virus
SARS-CoV-2 has had a lot of things playing in its favor, aside from having a global population naïve to it. Several other characteristics make it particularly successful.
First, while it does kill, it can also cause mild or asymptomatic infections in others. When pathogens kill most of their hosts, they are not so successful in spreading, because humans change their behavior in response to the perceived threat of the disease.
Ebola is a perfect example. College students would have been more likely to cancel their spring break plans to Florida in 2020 if they had expected that it might cause them to bleed out of their eyeballs, as happens in some people infected with the Ebola virus.
SARS-CoV-2 also has a long incubation period – the time between its infection of a new host and the start of the host’s symptoms. Yet it can be transmitted during the time before symptoms occur, which allows it to spread unnoticed.
More transmission, more new variants
If you’re thinking like the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen now, you’re furiously searching for a way around current vaccine formulations. The more cases you cause, the more chances you have for new variants that can break through the vaccines. You don’t care whether these cases occur in Montana or Mumbai. This is why no human is safe from the pandemic until transmission is controlled everywhere.
Thinking like a pathogen requires thinking over an evolutionary time scale, which for a virus is very short, sometimes the course of a single human infection. SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses have astonishing powers to adapt to changing conditions.
One of their survival strategies is the built-in mistakes in their reproduction machinery that cause mutations. Occasionally, a mutation occurs that improves the ability of a virus to survive and spread.
This leads to new variants, like those we have seen emerge recently. So far, available vaccines appear effective against the variants. But new variants may reduce vaccine effectiveness, or lead to a need for booster shots. The increased transmissibility of the new variants has already likely made chances of reaching herd immunity through vaccination out of reach.
We watch in horror as the virus ravages India, and to some it may seem like a distant threat. But every new case offers another opportunity for a new variant to emerge and spread worldwide.
To outsmart the virus, we need shots in arms everywhere
That is why global access to vaccines is not only a moral imperative but also the only way to outsmart the virus. The U.S. can do a lot right now to ensure global access to vaccines even as we step up vaccination here.
The U.S. has already made substantial commitments to COVAX, a global collaboration to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and guarantee equitable distribution.
The U.S. could channel additional funds now and pressure other countries to do the same. Funding commitments to COVAX may be hollow without a concurrent plan to quickly distribute the vaccine stockpile the U.S. has amassed as we raced to buy up the first available doses.
In addition to vaccination, the U.S. and other well-resourced countries can help increase the availability of testing in all countries. These countries can also provide technical and logistics assistance to improve vaccine rollout efforts and work to coordinate and improve global genomic surveillance so new variants are quickly identified.
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If this all seems expensive, think of the crushing economic costs of going back into lockdown. This is no time to be cheap.
To avoid jeopardizing the effectiveness of the millions of shots going into arms in rich countries, we must get shots into the arms of people in all countries.
Karen Levy, Associate Professor of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.