STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Ballet Sun Valley is canceling its 2020 Festival featuring the Pacific Northwest Ballet due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But, at this time, it plans to move ahead with its 2020 Education Program.
The tuition-free, two-day Education Intensive will take place Aug. 22 and 23 in Sun Valley. Faculty from the Pacific Northwest Ballet School will teach four levels of dance and choreography classes.
Pacific Northwest Ballet had planned to bring 25 dancers to Sun Valley to present two different evenings of classical and contemporary works in August. But organizers decided to cancel the festival for the safety and well-being of dancers, audience, staff and the larger Sun Valley community.
The ballet hopes to return to the Sun Valley Pavilion in Summer 2021, said Robert Smelick, the founder of Ballet Sun Valley.
BRONCOS SET TO RETURN
Boise State University officials have announced the campus will reopen this fall with dorms and dining halls in use. Students will be told to wear face masks. In-person class sizes will be reduced or relocated to larger rooms.
Football Coach Bryan Harsin has said he hopes to have players start taking the field for practice by June.
THE NUMBERS
Idaho, which has embarked on more testing this week, confirmed 31 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday. Reports for individual counties were not made public due to technical difficulties.
GOOD NEWS OUT OF CHINA
New cases of coronavirus dropped to zero in China for the first time Saturday.
If you consider that Chinese authorities confirmed they were treating people for the disease on Dec 31, that means it took five months to reach this point.
If Blaine County or Idaho would be so lucky, given that we didn’t employ the stringent restrictions that China did, we could be looking at zero new cases in mid- to late-August.
ZOMBIES OF THE MICROBE WORLD
Dr. Sanja Gupta has likened the United States to one of his patients as he explained the need to stay the course with physical distancing, frequent hand washing and wearing face coverings in an opinion piece he wrote for CNN.
“I have yet to meet a patient who relished their treatment and looked forward to it,” he wrote. “So, as a neurosurgeon, I have to take time to explain what I am recommending, why it should work and the perils of abandoning the treatment too early…
“For example,” he continued, “I often tell my patients that stopping an antibiotic too early for a bacterial infection could be worse than not taking one at all. While an antibiotic may quickly wipe out the easier-to-kill bacteria, stopping too early means only the toughest bacteria are left behind…and they quickly begin to replicate, causing a resistant infection that makes my patient worse off than when they started.”
Gupta noted that novel viruses, like the coronavirus, don’t announce themselves, ring the doorbell or call ahead.
“They just show up, using close friends and family members as Trojan horses… A billion of them could fit on the head of a pin… They are the zombies of the microbe world. Without us—the hosts—the virus is nothing, lacking any ability to grow, thrive or reproduce. It cannot even be cultured in a petri dish for scientific research. It can only grow in living cells, like the ones our bodies provide in abundance.”
The best defense? That would be a vaccine that recognizes the virus immediately and has a shoot-to-kill order, he said. But that will take time, so keep your distance in the meantime.