The Riverdale Review
Issue 3: June 11, 2021
Publishers' Note
Welcome to the last issue of the trimester for The Riverdale Review produced by Mr. McLain’s Current History Publications class. As a class, we hope to provide the community with accurate and entertaining News pieces as well as creative writing pieces. For this last issue, we had a fluctuation of pieces from the students, most of the stories written were from personal experiences during this crazy year and having to navigate taking online classes. We separated this issue by timeline. So one page will have articles that are about before covid happened, another page is about events during covid, and the last page is looking to the future and more post-pandemic. We hope you enjoy reading our final issue, and we hope you have a great summer.
Jolynn Tripi and Tolga Daim
Congratulations Mavs!
I just want to start this by congratulating everyone for finishing another school year! This year has been an emotional roller coaster for me as I’m sure it has for many of you. If one thing is for sure, this year has been one of if not the most challenging of our life. It’s crazy to think that we were living our normal lives without the masks and guidelines just over a year ago in March. The most drastic change for us however has been the change to online school. Adapting to this variant of education has been the biggest struggle this past year has brought us. Along with it being much harder to stay focused, the lack of peers around me to encourage me to do my best has been challenging. Nonetheless, we made it through the year and I couldn’t be more excited for summer. More than anything, I am looking forward to returning to full-time in-person school in the fall. Thank you all for taking the time to read our fun newsletter and once again, congrats on finishing another year of school. Sko Mavs!
Tommy McLaughlin
COVID-19 Update
June 9, 2021
By Sadie Meeker-Klingele
State:
The number of cumulative COVID cases has increased to 203,679 with a death toll of 2,729. There has been a recent spike since the beginning of June with 24 new deaths. Overall, the number of daily cases has decreased since the spike at the beginning of May. There is now a weekly average of 160 confirmed cases in Oregon. Currently, about 44% of the Oregonian population have been fully vaccinated and 56% have at least one dose. Hopefully that number can reach 100%.
Nationally:
Since the beginning of 2021, there has been a dramatic decrease in new daily cases from 257,000 to 9,000. California takes the lead for most cumulative cases at 3.8 million. In total, there have been about 33.5 million cases in the United States with 604,113 fatalities. Currently, around 42% of the US population is fully vaccinated and 51% have at least 1 dose. Vaccine trials on children under 12 are already being started.
Internationally:
The number of cumulative cases worldwide is now at 174.1 million with a death toll of 3.8 million. India is still quite bad but the number of new daily cases is slowly decreasing. The number for worldwide daily cases is also slowly decreasing. Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, has become the first region in the world to have the entire population fully vaccinated. Seychelles comes in second with about 65% of its population fully vaccinated. Globally, about 2.2 billion people have been vaccinated.
Featured COVID Headline
Vaccination delay in Japan
By Shotaro Norville
Jun 3, 2021
According to the data compiled on May 9 by the University of Oxford in the UK, only 2.59% of the entire population of Japan have received at least one vaccination, which is significantly low compared to Israel's 62.64% and UK's 52.25%. Japan's rollout of the coronavirus vaccines started to belate in February. The clinical trials of foreign vaccines cause the delay. While other nations have accepted Pfizer vaccines after the trial results were released in November, people in Japan tend to be skeptical of foreign-produced vaccines. Therefore the health officials claimed that the delay and rigorous safety trials were necessary to gain more reliability. Ultimately, 36 million citizens 65 and older became eligible to access the vaccination on April 12 and had already surpassed 11 million doses in 3 days. There are no announcements of when all people can access vaccines, but the officials stated that most of the elderly would get fully vaccinated by the end of July. Additionally, while Japan has already secured more than 340 million vaccines that will be supplied, multiple Japanese medical companies/institutes are developing vaccines, some of them clinically tested and are planned to be publicly approved by the end of the year.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1636/
https://vdata.nikkei.com/newsgraphics/coronavirus-japan-vaccine-status/(Japanese)
