Just in case you forgot in the rush of the Holiday Season, the annual Lake Placid Christmas Parade is on for tomorrow night. Start time is around 7pm, taking the circuit through Downtown Lake Placid. The Sebring Boat Parade on Lake Jackson also happens tomorrow evening, and Lawn Mower Racing is back at the Avon Park Mowerplex. Races begin at 6pm there – spectators are asked to bring a toy along for the “Joy For All” program donating toys to less-fortunate youngsters.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said yesterday Florida will receive 179,400 doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine & will be prioritizing high-exposure health care personnel to receive the vaccine first. Health workers are saying the new vaccines can’t come soon enough – based on Highlands County’s last As of yesterday evening, 45 locals were in area hospitals being treated for the bug, 25 of them in Intensive Care units. In the last week, we’ve lost 31 souls to the disease or complications from it, and have registered 285 new cases of the infection locally. The median age of someone catching the disease here is 51, and almost 7 out of 10 recorded cases are in age groups under 65. Out of 4,147 cases here, only 31 nonresidents have tested positive in the County.
A bunch of questions came in yesterday afternoon here about some police “excitement” on the south end of Sebring in the DeSoto City area … the Sheriff’s Department says it was a resident who’d been making threats and then refused to come out of the house to talk about it. The situation was resolved peacefully after an hour or so without major incident.
The Highlands County School District this week announced a slight relaxation of some of the schools’ Covid -19 protocols, in conformance with current CDC suggestions. Under new protocol, temperature and daily symptom checks at bus stops and school entrances – the no-contact quarantine period has been reduced from 14 to 10 days, again, following the CDC’s current recommendations. Obviously, if they show symptoms during that period things change. The District says it’ll provide at home learning plans for students who test positive for the virus.
Highlands County Golf Courses are starting a new Tour next year – the Citrus Golf Trail Open will be held next December as an amateur event across a half dozen local courses including Sun N Lake, Sebring Muni, Pinecrest and Sebring International Golf Resort. The local Boys and Girls Clubs will be the beneficiary of the event, announced by the County Tourism Board yesterday morning.