Deep-fried Oreos, funnel cakes on the menu at Fair Eats Drive-Thru
Summer is carnival season, and not even a pandemic will keep people from indulging in deepfried Oreos.
That’s the gamble behind this weekend’s Fair Eats Drive-Thru, a threeday bonanza of artery-clogging carnival food rolling into the South Florida Fairgrounds July 3-5.
Call it a carnival for the social distancing set, but without the stomachchurning Gravitron or the rigged midway games. Visitors
Customers can pick up carnival fare such as funnel cakes at the Fair Eats Drive-Thru July 3-5 at the South Florida Fairgrounds in West Palm Beach.
– without leaving their cars – can order 14 menu items for curbside pickup, including candy apples, elephant ears, funnel cakes, small and jumbo corn dogs, turkey legs, fried Oreos and Snickers, cotton candy, chicken tenders, roasted corn and buckets of French fries.
“People are going nuts for this on our social media,” says Vicki Chouris, South Florida Fairgrounds’ president and CEO. “Which makes me nervous, because it could be too popular.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled state and county fairs across the country this summer, South Florida Fairgrounds got creative, calling up outof-work vendors to fire up their carnival confections, Chouris says. The idea, she says, keeps concessionaires working and patrons happy with deep-fried goodness.
“The fried Snickers and
and beaches.
Such steps will take time to have an effect, and in the meantime, hospitals said they would take action to make sure they could accommodate patients with urgent medical needs.
In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Jackson Health System CEO Carlos Migoya said that in the past two weeks, the number of coronavirus patients at the Miami-based hospital system rose from 150 to 300.
“We’re reducing wherever possible any surgeries that can be delayed for a period of time that we would have issues with intensive care,” Migoya said. “An example for that would be people that are having kidney transplants, predominantly more living donors.”
Migoya said outpatient surgeries will be continued at this time because they do not require either medical surgery beds or intensive care unit beds.
Migoya said Jackson saw the numbers of available intensive care unit and hospital beds “get a little too close to comfort,” which led to the decision to halt elective surgeries, and as Migoya described it, “sound the alarm.”
Memorial Healthcare, which operates hospitals that serve southern Broward County, said in-patient surgeries will be restricted to urgent procedures. The system’s hospitals will continue to perform outpatient surgeries. The limitation does not extend to Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital.
“Memorial is committed to the safety of all caregivers and patients,” Memorial said in a written statement. “As we take care of our community and monitor the impact of the pandemic in South Florida, we continue to manage COVID-19 patients and patients with other non-COVID medical needs. Patients should contact their physician to check on their scheduled surgery.”
Baptist Health, which runs 13 South Florida hospitals, said only in-patient procedures will be affected by the limits on elective surgeries.
“Elective surgeries and procedures at our hospitals requiring overnight stays are being evaluated daily across our inpatient facilities based on the capacity of each hospital,” said a statement from the system. “We will communicate directly with any patient whose surgery or procedure may need to be rescheduled. Any surgery or procedure that is taking place in an outpatient location will not be impacted at this time.”
A spokesman for the system did not respond to an email asking for details.
Elective surgeries are not necessarily minor. While they include such non-essential procedures as nose jobs and face lifts, they include hip replacements, colonoscopies, the placement of heart stents, organ transplants, the removal of potentially cancerous skin growths and many other operations that are necessary for the patient’s health.
“There’s some electives that are really urgent and emergent,” Jackson CEO Migoya said. “Some of the ones that have deferred in the past were tumors, for example, malignant tumors that could have been delayed. But now that we’ve delayed them 100 days, they’re not so longer an elective. It becomes more of an emergent environment, so that’s an issue.”
COVID-19 cases have soared in Florida over the past week, smashing record after record and casting doubt on decisions by authorities to allow aspects of normal life to resume.
The state announced 6,563 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, its fourth-highest one-day total. The record is 9,585 cases on Saturday, followed by 8,942 on Friday, and 8,530 on Sunday.
Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, chairwoman of the Epidemiology Department at Florida International University, said the growth in hospitalizations shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the growth in cases.
“This is what we expected,” she said. “We’re expecting that to continue with the uptick of new cases. We’re expecting that to continue, so hospitals have to be ahead of the game. They have to have resources available.”
The latest restrictions on public activity could help prevent this, she said, but they will take time to reduce the daily case numbers.
“Those are high-risk situations that are now being curtailed,” Trepka said. “The problem is that we won’t see the effect of those decisions for about two weeks. I would expect that for the next two weeks we’re going to continue to see a lot of cases. Hopefully, it will level off in two weeks as the effect of these measures starts to kick in.”
Broward Health, which operates a four-hospital system that serves the northern two-thirds of the county, is not making any major changes at this time, said spokeswoman Joy Oglesby.
“We’re not canceling surgeries at this time and will address elective procedures based on need,” she said.
Although COVID-19 caseloads are rising, South Florida hospitals generally retain comfortable margins of available beds, according to statistics kept by the Florida Agency on Healthcare Administration. The available capacity stands at 20% in Broward County, 21% in Miami-Dade County and 25% in Palm Beach County.
For adult intensive care beds, the numbers were worse. The available ICU capacity of Broward hospitals is 13% in Broward County, 20% in MiamiDade County and 21% in Palm Beach County.
Jackson Health’s Migoya said the limit on elective surgeries would allow the system to experience a “soft landing,” gradually reducing the number of nonCOVID patients to make room for those brought in by the epidemic. But he warned that if masks are not worn and social distancing is not practiced, in a few weeks’ time things could be out of hand.
“If we continue to see more infection and more people need to be hospitalized, in a period of three, four, five, six weeks, it will get to a point that we will be way beyond the point that any hospital or all hospitals can do this,” Migoya said.