Nov 29, 2024 3 min read

Jeers: The arrival of Thanksgiving on Thursday marked the start of the holiday season, and it also marked an all-too-likely surge in cases of COVID-19 and the flu across the country. While nowhere near as widespread or severe as it was in 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 can still take lives and send people to the hospital. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a little more than 76,000 Americans died as a result of COVID-19 last year – almost twice the number who died in automobile accidents. Getting vaccinated is still the best way to protect yourself from COVID-19 and the flu. New vaccines hit the market this fall, and odds are you won’t have any problem getting an appointment – last year, just 23% of Americans got the booster that was made available. Neither the latest COVID-19 shot nor the flu vaccine will prevent you from catching either of them, but they will reduce the symptoms and increase the chances of survival. If you haven’t already gotten them, put that on your holiday season to-do list.

Cheers: Homelessness in the United States increased by 12% in 2023, with the list of culprits including stagnant wages, increasing health care costs and a simple lack of affordable housing. The number of homeless Americans is expected to increase again this year. In Washington County, Washington City Mission has been indispensable in lending a hand to people who find themselves without a place to live. Last week, City Mission officials, including Diana Irey Vaughan, the City Mission’s CEO and a former Washington County commissioner, outlined the impact City Mission had on the community from Oct. 1, 2023, until Sept. 30 of this year. During that time, City Mission served more than 1,400 different people, provided almost 85,000 meals, more than 47,000 nights of shelter, more than 14,000 medical clinic services and more than 9,000 grocery bags to residents and the community. Also, 150 homeless individuals were transitioned into their own homes, and City Mission’s Career Training and Education Center helped 129 people get jobs. Dave Greer, who coordinates the men’s residential program, arrived at the City Mission in 2017 as a “broken individual” battling addiction and health problems. He explained that City Mission “gave me a whole new lease on life. … I knew I wanted to get my life back, I just didn’t know how to do it on my own. I came here and they loved me with open arms.”

Cheers: If you moved to the Pittsburgh region while Myron Cope was still doing color commentary on the radio during Pittsburgh Steelers games, your most likely reaction was probably something along the lines of, “What the heck??!!” Cope, who died in 2008, had anything but a standard, mellifluous radio voice – it was high-pitched, scratchy, thick with Pittsburghese, and he was prone to delivering rapid-fire, hypercaffeinated remarks that would have required subtitles had he been on TV. But to generations of Pittsburghers, Cope was like the beloved, wacky uncle who would get just as excited about Steeler triumphs as anyone else in their living rooms. A new biography, “Behind the Yoi,” detailed this week in the Herald-Standard, takes a look back on Cope’s life, including his charitable work and extensive career writing and reporting about sports before he landed on radio and television. The fact that such a biography even exists underscores what a memorable, one-of-a-kind figure Cope was.