Many 2020 art programs have been postponed indefinitely or moved online due to the pandemic that has plagued our country and state this year. One event that folks are especially missing in the Saranac Lake area is Third Thursday ArtWalks.
To answer the challenge of bringing visual and literary artists together with the community to exhibit and market their work, Saranac Lake ArtWorks and the Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce have come together to offer a safe and socially distanced outdoor market: ArtWorks ArtMarket.
Historic Saranac Lake will be hosting a reading of “Safe Harbor,” a play about Saranac Lake during the height of Tuberculosis. The play will be read starting at 5:30 p.m. this Thursday, Sept. 10, from a cure porch in the village to a small (socially distant) audience.
The play is about two residents of a small cure cottage in Saranac Lake, whose lives intersect due to tuberculosis. “Safe Harbor” illuminates the experiences of many who, after being made outcasts in their own homes, were able to reclaim their humanity from TB.
In a time when compassion and logic often seem in short supply, many of us have a newfound appreciation for doctors and scientists. Saranac Lake’s history is full of professionals in medicine and science who had a passion for learning and an intense curiosity about the natural world.
Our own Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau was a naturalist at heart. He learned an interest in the natural world from his father James, who accompanied his friend John J. Audubon on scientific expeditions. When Edward fell sick with TB, he credited the peace he found in the Adirondack forest for his ability to fight the disease.
Later, that same appreciation for nature inspired Trudeau to pursue the scientific study of tuberculosis. In 1882, Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium. Trudeau learned of his study and rushed to replicate Koch’s work, despite never having used a microscope himself. Motivated by his desire to find a cure and his own curiosity, Trudeau demonstrated incredible persistence in the face of adversity. He began his work in a remote, freezing village with no running water, electricity, or train service. As he stated in his autobiography, “One of my great problems was to keep my guinea-pigs alive in winter.” Trudeau worked with improvised laboratory equipment, and even when his first home and home laboratory burned down, he didn’t give up.
The Silver Bay YMCA Conference and Family Retreat Center has expanded its Vacations Made Possible program to offer rest and renewal at no cost to essential workers who served at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program, which was established in 2015 to provide free vacation opportunities to families with limited financial means, broadened its original scope in response to the pandemic that shut New York State down for over two months.
Sixty-two percent of New Yorkers say completely opening schools runs too great a risk of spreading the disease despite how hard not opening is on kids and families, according to a new statewide survey of residents released today by the Siena College Research Institute (SCRI). Thirty-two percent say that we have to bring the children back to school and do our best to mitigate the risks. By 66-27 percent, New Yorkers say colleges should only deliver remote education and not bring students back to campus for the fall semester.
New York State’s largest workers’ compensation carrier – the New York State Insurance Fund (NYSIF) – introduced a new COVID-19 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Premium Credit Program that will make it more affordable for its policyholders to get back to business. Under the new initiative, current workers’ comp policyholders can earn a 5% credit of their annual premium on the purchase of PPE, with a maximum reimbursement of $500.
The program is designed to help offset the cost of vital PPE and safety-related items needed to help protect workers from the COVID-19 virus. Eligible equipment includes masks, goggles, gloves, gowns, hand sanitizer and other COVID-19 safety related items.
For more details on NYSIF’s COVID-19 PPE Premium Credit Program, as well as training materials on how businesses can protect their workers, please visit www.nysif.com/PPEinfo.
The North Country Food Co-op in Plattsburgh is more than a neighborhood grocery store. It’s become a place where shoppers can find healthy food and comfort, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
With many businesses and institutions closed, and even friends and extended family off limits, the co-op offered more than food, it offered comfort and support to its clients. They might have lost a job, or had people in their lives fall sick or die, or suffered from plain loneliness. For them, the co-op was well stocked not just with food, but with sympathetic ears. Some people were just very lonely and needed somebody to talk to,” Co-op Manager Carol Czaja said. “In the past we would have given them a hug.”
As Northwood School in Lake Placid gets back in session, the campus has closed access to the Cobble Hill Trailhead.
With the parking lot currently off limits to outside visitors, Northwood has worked with the Adirondack Land Trust to have an alternative trail to the Cobble hiking trails. The above map shows how people can access the trail from Mirror Lake Drive.
The school’s website has been updated with this information. There will be a QR code on signs and banners posted on the edge of campus that will take hikers to this webpage: https://www.northwoodschool.org/alternative-cobble-access
Following the temporary moratorium on face-to-face visitation at Mercy Living Center last week, Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake has stopped most hospital patient visitation for at least seven days.
Beginning today, visitation is only permitted for maternity care partners and imminent end-of-life situations. There are currently zero COVID-19-positive patients at Adirondack Medical Center. The decision to temporarily restrict visitation was made in view of the continued spread of the virus in neighboring Essex county, as well as the increased number of Franklin and Essex county residents in precautionary quarantine due to potential exposure.
In July 2020, the Federal Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about a sharp increase in hand sanitizer products that are labeled to contain ethanol (also known as ethyl alcohol) but that have tested positive for methanol contamination. Methanol, or wood alcohol, is a substance that can be toxic when absorbed through the skin or ingested and can be life-threatening when ingested. The FDA is working with manufacturers to recall products. This guidance addresses actions you can take to dispose of recalled hand sanitizer. » Continue Reading.
From Erica Mahoney, Director of Public Health for Hamilton County:
Two individuals who were staying at Golden Beach Campground in Raquette Lake, NY have tested positive for COVID-19. The couple checked into the campground on Saturday, Aug. 15 and stayed through the morning of Thursday, Aug. 20. These individuals are no longer at the campground, contact tracing is complete and those who were at high risk of exposure have been contacted.
First-hand accounts left behind in letters, photographs, diaries, and memoirs paint a picture of life in Saranac Lake during the TB years. It’s an incomplete record that can lead us to believe curing was an overwhelmingly positive experience.
It takes energy, time, and a degree of mental and physical well being to leave behind a personal record. People who were very ill, illiterate, or struggling with poverty did not have the same opportunity to create, or later preserve, accounts of their experiences.
When Enchanted Forest Water Safari — one of the longest running attractions in the Adirondacks — announced the park would not open for the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 crisis, Old Forge area residents and businesses feared that the closure would hit the local economy hard. There would be lost summer jobs, lost sales-tax revenue, and lost business income that would ripple through the local economy like wavelets from a vigorously paddled canoe on Old Forge Pond.
The family-owned Water Safari is the largest summer employer in Herkimer County, drawing workers from Herkimer, Lewis, and Oneida counties, as well as J-1 Visa workers from abroad, many of whom spend money that circulates through the local economy. Read how the community of Old Forge, as well as other tourist-dependent towns in the Adirondacks are coping in the wake of closures of key businesses and events in this story from the weekend, in the Adirondack Explorer: https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/closures-hit-some-adirondack-businesses-hard-but-there-are-silver-linings
(Enchanted Forest photo from 1973, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Resulting from a successful partnership with AdkAction, The Hub on the Hill will deliver approximately 5,500 Emergency Food Packages (EFPs) by October 1, 2020. This project has supplied tens of thousands of meals and put food on the tables of hundreds of families facing increased food insecurity due to COVID-19.
The Hyde Collection is offering free admission to all essential workers and their families throughout the month of August as a thank you for their service during the COVID-19 crisis. After being closed for several months because of the pandemic, The Hyde Collection reopened to visitors on the first of the month.
In accordance with CDC guidelines, The Hyde is open only for visitors who have made appointments on hydecollection.org. When making a reservation online, there is an “Essential Workers and Family” field where first responders, health care workers and all other essential workers can enter the number of family members they will be attending with, and they will not be charged for those tickets.
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